


The Tumblr Oneshots

by anamatics



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, One Shot Collection, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:49:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 32,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: Responses to tumblr prompts, drabbles, and otherwise short fiction. Mostly about Joan (and Moriarty). Each piece stands alone.
Relationships: Jamie Moriarty | Irene Adler/Joan Watson (Elementary), Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson (Elementary)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 63





	1. we collect our scars and wear them well (1.5k)

**Author's Note:**

> These are old, and I'm finally moving them all over here. If you've followed me for any time at all, you've probably read most of these.

_Duende - Unusual power to attract or charm._

_we collect our scars and wear them well. (1.5k)_

*

On her wrists there are raised, jagged red marks nestled between her ulnar and radial arteries. Twin scars to add to her growing collection. A grim reminder of everything that she is willing to sacrifice for love.

(And yet it is not for love that she’d done it. Pride, perhaps. Her vanity has always been something of a weakness, after all.

Curiosity? Now that was a more convincing reason. She likes order, likes to see the patterns in the chaos. Likes to cause the upheaval of whole worlds.

It only makes sense that she’d be curious about the one who’d upended her own.)

She won’t touch them. They are too raw still, too new.

Jamie Moriarty sits with her hands in standard-issue police handcuffs, a steady stream of her blood leaking out from between stitched up wrists and onto the shiny grey surface of the restraints. She’s holding her wrists away from her, and the steady drip, drip, drip of her lifeblood onto the floor is enough to help her pass the time. They’ve locked her in a room, locked her to a chair.

(She could pick the lock with the underwire in her bra if she was interested in leaving. Or the back of an earring that they’d foolishly neglected to confiscate for that matter. But Jamie wants to stay in this chair - in this room - until the answers come to her.

And come they will.)

She’d cut her wrist in the process of them putting the handcuffs on. The scars are still swollen, new skin only just healed, scabs just barely picked off. Reopened it, they’d said. They’d checked that it wasn’t deep and left her.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Someone needs something only she possesses. The list of someones to whom Jamie is allowed to speak is an ever-shrinking commodity.

Hope curls in the pit of her stomach and it aches in her chest. She hates it. To see him, to see her, it would be a gift. To give in to the inexorable pull of them, sun-like and overpowering, it seems almost like a fitting outcome.

(Yet Jamie is a black hole and will consume all matter that comes into her path.

Her love affair with the stars is ongoing, even if they are drowned out in this dismal city’s nightly glow.)

Her knee starts to bounce. She stills it. It’s too much to show. Anxiety is a habit she kicked at eleven when she realized it would kill her mother. (A full bottle of valium did her in, washed down with the finest of Father’s scotch. Jamie doesn’t particularly care for mothers.)

(Even if she is one herself.)

Another drop of blood rolls down Jamie’s finger and lands in the growing collection of little red splashes on the floor. Like discarded paint from a brush. Jamie stares down at them. She wants to see what they’d be like under a brush. Could she coax an image out of the mark of her own weakness? Would she?

The door pushes open and there is only one person on the other side. And not, really, the one she’d dared allow herself to suspect.

“Joan!" Her voice is scratchy with disuse, but she forces warmth into her tone. She will not be seen as anything but cordial. "How lovely to see you.”

Watson looks awful.

“Save it.” Jamie hears the terse reply as if she’s underwater. She can see the red marks around Watson’s neck. White hot rage fills Jamie and her fingers twitch in the cuffs. She will kill whoever did that to Watson. She will kill the person who stole Watson’s sleep from her, the one who made Jamie’s most precious enemy look like nothing more than a tired husk of a woman no more worthy of Jamie’s time than any of her hired guns.

“I would offer to shake your hand." Her tone is carefully neutral and conversational, but she’s watching Watson now, already caught up in the pull of her. Sherlock has described it in his letters, and Jamie has felt it herself. It is impossible to pull away from it, and Jamie wonders if it is Watson that is the all-consuming black hole, and Jamie an unsuspecting sun. "But it seems that someone has touched you without your consent, and we can’t have that." Jamie tilts her head to the side. "Tell me, Joan, where is Sherlock?”

“Fucked off with MI-6.” Watson’s voice is barely a whisper, a growl. Jamie’s eyebrows furrow. Watson is angry. Doesn’t want to talk about Sherlock. How curious. “That isn’t why I’m here.”

“No,” Jamie replies. “I imagine that it isn’t.”

They stare at each other for a long, drawn out period of time. Watson folds her arms over her chest, a scowl tugging at her lips. Another drop of blood rolls down Jamie’s finger. The clock on the wall above the observation window moves loudly to the next minute.

“You’re bleeding.”

“I am.”

Watson pulls open her purse and passes Jamie a tissue. Their fingers brush, blood smears on Watson’s hand. Jamie wants to lick it off. The strength of the want startles her, and she withdraws quickly. Her face is schooled neutral, but her mind is spiraling down the inevitable pull of Joan Watson.

(They draw on each other, for Jamie is sure if she were to run it would be Watson, and not Sherlock, who would chase her. Watson’s proven that she is indeed capable to winning a battle of their wills, and Jamie shan’t underestimate her again.

She wants to know who brutalized her. She will see the skin peeled away from their bones inch by tantalizing inch.

Watson is her downfall; Jamie will not let her fall to anyone less than the best.)

“Why are you here, then, Joan?”

She looks away, black hair falling into her eyes. A lie is coming, or perhaps she’s ashamed. It doesn’t suit her.

Her eyes are cold when she looks back up. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Joan, I am hardly in a position to do anything at all." Jamie gestures towards the door, forcing an entirely disingenuous smile onto her face. "My jailors cannot be bothered with a simple bandage or a tissue to stop the bleeding. What makes you think that I will be able to even consider your request?”

There is a smile on Watson’s face then. It is small, but it is triumphant. Her hand, still streaked with blood, reaches out to catch Jamie’s wrist. She twists it over, in the cuff. The scars are there, red and raised, and Watson touches them as Jamie does not dare to.

“I know what you’d do for love,” Watson says. Her fingers circle the open wound, the raised healing scars of broken glass and desperation. The touch is feather-light, almost reverent. Jamie’s lips part, she shifts forward in her chair.

(She’s lost control of the situation. Watson is playing her, appealing to her vanity, to her obsession. She’s giving Jamie all that she could possibly ever want.

Would she give the final piece, draw Jamie in completely? Ensnare the greatest criminal mind the world had ever known with something as petty as infatuation?

Or would it be love then?

Jamie doesn’t know.)

The ache in her stomach does not subside. “I need you to use your contacts to find someone. He’s a smuggler. Drugs, but he does antiquities on the side. You’re going to forge a painting and you’re going to pass it off to him as the real thing.”

“Darling, that is hardly the sort of thing I can do locked up in this place.”

Watson’s smile widens, her fingers never cease their movement. “You’d have to stay with me, to make this work.”

“And Sherlock?”

“As I said, he’s working with British Intelligence on something else right now." Watson tilts her head to one side, hair cascading over her shoulder and a thoughtful look pulling at her face. The realization that Watson knows everything hits Jamie like a gunshot to the chest. She wants to fly backwards, tilting, unbalanced. She’s lost the upper hand.

(She’ll try her luck.)

"On one condition." Jamie meets Watson’s gaze evenly, her breath steady and calm. Curious. She wants to see what Watson will do.

A little breath of laughter escapes Watson’s lips. She rises to her feet and crosses to Jamie’s side of the table. Her eyes are shining, dark and brown and she smells of the city outside of these walls. Jamie doesn’t dare breath in, giving away the game simply would not do.

"I can guess it.” Watson is so close; her breath is on Jamie’s lips. “But you’ll have to earn it." Her fingers tug on the cuffs, a key slipping into the lock. Jamie’s wrists fall free.

(She wants to take what’s been offered but it is not the wisest move. Let Watson believe that she’s been drawn in. It isn’t a lie, after all. Jamie can be objective, she knows what she’s getting into.)

Jamie doesn’t move.

"I’ll get you a band-aid.”

“Don’t bother,” Jamie replies, setting the tissue aside. “The bleeding’s stopped.”

The scar will linger, a reminder of all that she refuses to admit.


	2. joaniarty week - (graduate school, pre-canon) a chance meeting (1k)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Joaniarty Week 2014, prompt 2: Graduate School

Joan is eleven hours into a sixteen hour shift, mind frazzled beyond the point of function, when she encounters the most interesting patient that she’s had in weeks sitting on the table in exam room one. 

She’s going strong but her shoulders ache and every glance in a passing mirror reveals large bags under her eyes and a hollow, haunted look about her person. Running on coffee and a power bar from the vending machine on the third floor, had never been her intended career choice. She was barely three weeks into the rotation and already seriously regretting her decision to take on the triage-emergency room rotation as the first rotation of her residency. Even N-ICU would be better than dealing with the usual ER faire of no insurance, no names and way too many gunshot wounds and drug overdoses for this early hour of the morning.

“Ms. Adler?” she says, knocking on the door. There’s blood and vomit on her scrub pants and she hasn’t had time to change them. Sitting on the examination table with a murderous expression on her face, wrist cradled close to her chest is Irene Adler. She came in three hours ago. Joan is running behind. “I have your x-rays here.” She crosses over to the light table and jams the x-ray up into the clip. The light flickers on, and Joan stares at the obviously spiral fracture to the girl’s wrist. "It looks like you’re going to need a cast.“

The curled lip and narrowed eyes don’t even shift as Joan moves to a supply cabinet and collects the needed materials to set the arm and put the cast on. "Do you have a preference to color?" she asks, because people usually do.

"I’m eighteen years old; I am not some simpering child who must be made to feel better with a cheerful disposition that you are so clearly faking." The voice that comes out of Irene Adler is ice cold and Joan’s startled to hear the accent. She’d assumed, going off her expensive boots and clearly designer wool-blend pants that she was some sort of well-off upper crust socialite’s daughter.

To hear a crisp, cool, decidedly posh (if Joan’s loose knowledge of all things Spice Girls that lingered from babysitting to supplement her work-study position in college was anything to go by) British accent out of a girl whose address is listed as the mathematics department at Columbia is a little jarring. Joan tries not to let her surprise show, she’s too tired to care as it is, there’s only five more hours of this hell and then she gets to go home and sleep.

"What makes you think I’m faking?" Joan asks, looping her ankle around the rolling stool and pulling it after her as she moves to settle herself before in front of the exam table. Irene Adler’s eyes are red-rimmed and despite the haughty look on her face there’s dirt on her cheek. "A good bedside manner is important for a doctor.”

“You’re still in school.” Scowling, Irene watches Joan set a bright, neon green roll of plaster on the table beside her. She eyes it for a long minute as Joan arranges out the rest of her things before adding, in a small voice that feels superficial to Joan. It’s meant to pull at her, they’d talked about patients like this in her medical ethics class a few times, and again in the grief seminar that she’d decided to attend on a whim after losing her first patient. “Could I get a white one, actually?”

“So are you,” Joan points out, picking up the neon green roll and getting to her feet. “You go to Columbia?”

“I am doing some work there, yes,” she says judiciously - evasively.

“Work?”

“I’m writing a paper on stellar dynamics.” She says it with a small shrug and Joan’s eyebrows shoot up to mingle with her hairline. Astrophysics, advanced mathematics. This girl had to be one of those child geniuses they sometimes wrote about in _Time_ or _Newsweek_. “New York is so tiresome, but I needed access to the research that they weren’t willing to send over to London.”

Joan senses her in, getting down a roll of plain white plaster. “Is that how you broke your wrist?" She asks it dryly, it isn’t as if she knows the length that academics will go to get papers that they need.

Irene Adler looks Joan dead in the eye, her face a blank mask. "No, that was something else.”

“A boyfriend?”

“ _No._ ”

“There are numbers you can call, places you can go.”

“He won’t be a problem anymore, Doctor Watson." Her lips twist into something that could be a predatory smile, if it didn’t look so out of place on such a young face. Joan wants to pull back, to ask again, more seriously this time. She doesn’t like being so flippantly dismissed.

Joan makes a humming noise, looking at the wrist that’s been held out for her. She can see where the bone is broken, a bruise is already forming across the outer edges of her wrist. She touches it with gentle fingers, feeling to make sure that there aren’t any red flags, that the circulation is good. "Did you get a friend to beat him up?”

“No, Doctor Watson, I got a friend to kill him.”

Later, when Joan is lying away staring up at the cracks in her ceiling, almost frightened by how they seem to move like spindly fingers against the great white expanse of space above her, Joan is stuck on those words. They settled into the pit of her stomach, twisting into a knot that pulls ever-tighter.

She is stuck, still fixated on her patient’s lips as they had curled after confessing complacency in a murder. She had relished telling Joan, enjoyed the way that it had shocked Joan.

Joan rolls over, fingers twisting around her sheets, and closes her eyes. It cuts into her subconscious, that mocking smile, settling into her nightmares. Robbing her of precious sleep.


	3. plea (600 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I wrote you that letter but you were never supposed to get it" from kuro-yong

Her last great act in the warehouse prison was to pen a letter that was to be the dismantling of all she had built. It was an exercise in humility, using beautiful words to throw herself to her knees before her destroyer and beg for salvation.

As the hours grow from old to young, the language turned painfully sentimental. There were scattered, crumpled beginnings and endings littering the floor, brushing at her ankles as she shifted forward, pen set to paper and her wrist, aching from hours of writing now, penned the final line.

“I would live very much to take you out, my dear Watson, and see you fall before me.”

She stared at it for a long time, contemplating the layers of meaning in her words. It would leave a time for guessing and a time for action.  
And it would never be sent.

-

A month after her departure, she happened upon Watson in the city. She was between meetings, trying to piece together the state of her legitimate enterprises, Watson was, evidentially, halfway through a run.

She was beautiful breathless, her eyes wide with fear.

Jamie smiled at her and stepped aside. “I shan’t keep you.”

Watson never looked away. “I got your letter.”

Her heart started to hammer in her ears. It had been destroyed, she’d made sure of it. Jamie’s fingers clenched around her briefcase and she nodded curtly, trying to play off her panic behind a blank smile and dead eyes. “Did you?”

“I didn’t want to respond.” Watson bit at her chapped lip, fingers twisting around her headphone cord. “I …” and she finally did look down. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“I never wanted a reply,” Jamie replied smoothly. She turned then, and started to walk away. This conversation had caught her unaware, and she hated that. She needed time to think before she dared play another game with Watson.

“Wait!” Watson’s hand shot out and grabbed Jamie’s forearm, pulling her back all tense muscles and fingers itching to pull out her gun and bury a bullet in between Watson’s eyes.

(It was far too public a venue for that, however.)

“It sounded like a plea.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“Then why send it at all?”

Why do anything? Why act when all the strands of your web were tangled up in a knot at your feet? Why tempt fate? Why be reckless?

“It was never meant to be sent, Watson. I asked Agent Matoo to burn it after my matches were taken away. Obviously he saw fit to forward it to you instead.”

Watson looked down at her trainers. “Okay.” Her voice was soft, lost in the sound of the street.

“Beg pardon?”

“I said okay.” Watson hesitated a moment, and then tugged a battered business card out of her jacket pocket. “I have a new number. If you do–”

Sherlock was gone from the city now. It almost made sense she was lonely.

Jamie’s fingers curled around the card, on Watson’s warm skin. “You don’t want me to call this number.” A gambit.

“I don’t.”

“But you want me to have it.”

“I do.” Watson gave a bark of uncomfortable, nervous laughter. “So you don’t hack my phone again.”

“Ah.” Jamie nodded. “That was rather rude of me.”

“Indeed.”

Watson knew all of her secrets now, after all. What was the harm in reaching out when she was ready for another game?

She was already running, off though the sea of people, without even saying goodbye.

Somehow, Jamie felt hollow, watching her run away.


	4. refusal (600 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> no prompt

The folds of the letter start to tear. Joan read it so many times that the words were imprinted into her every waking moment, stamped across her consciousness. It was a gesture that she should not accept, the killing of Elana March. Even knowing that the woman was dead filled made Joan’s stomach turn in unhappy somersaults. She was torn between gratitude and self-loathing.

Andrew was dead.

But somehow, his death felt avenged. 

“You’ve kept up your correspondence.”

He looked up, eyes narrowing for a moment before widening in concentration. He shuffled his papers around on his lap and clapped his hands together. Resting his elbows on his knees, he regarded her solemnly. “I got caught up in trying to understand her.”

“You told her about Andrew.”

“I told her you were happy,. I said you’d found someone who made you smile, and that you were thriving. I thought it would frustrate her, to know you were doing so well.” He fidgeted, scratched at the back of his head, and turned his attention back to Joan.

“And March?”

“One does, on occasion, like to brag, Watson." Sherlock sighed. "But that, at least, was in the papers. She does still take the Ledger.”

“Well, I’m glad to know that she still takes the paper." She couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. Joan exhaled, shifted forward. The coach was digging into her thigh uncomfortably. "She said she was sorry about Andrew.”

“As am I.”

She wanted to reach forward, grab his arm and shake him. “She doesn’t care about other people." Why wasn’t he getting that? Why wasn’t he understanding how truly bizarre this was. This was not Moriarty. This was not who she was. This was not right. 

Sherlock said nothing for a long time. Joan was about to break the silence when he pushed himself to his feet. She followed his movements as he went to stand by the fireplace. He drummed his fingers on the mantle for a moment before turning to face her again. 

"I think,” he said, his voice gentle. “That she cares more than you might think." He shoved his hands into his pockets, giving a small hop, his eyes kind. "Feelings are something of an Achilles Heel for her.”

“I don’t want her to care about me.”

“I’m afraid your triumph of wits over her and the subsequent time you spent together during the Fuller case has done little to deter her interest in you.”

“It was hardly a triumph." Joan shook her head, refusing to accept it. "And she murdered for that girl.”

“As she’s now done for you." His eyes were kind, but his words cut Joan like a knife. "While the circumstances are regrettable, I am not saddened by Elana March’s death.” He sniffed. “She was a murderer, she killed your lover, and her death has given you peace of mind.”

Tears, frustrated and unwanted, prickled at the corners of Joan’s eyes. She swiped angrily at them. “I don’t want it. It isn’t right to relish feelings like that." 

Sherlock moved, almost before Joan could guess what he was going to do. He sat down next to her. He didn’t touch her, or even invade her space, but he sat there and let her sniffle, let her cry. Let the frustration and the anguish and the confusion pour out.

And just when Joan felt like she was going to lose it entirely, Sherlock’s hand was there, warm at her shoulder. They didn’t hug, they never hugged, but this was far more than Joan could have ever wanted.

"I’m not going to write her back." Joan said after Sherlock’s hand pulled away. She looked down at her hands, still and folded in her lap. "That’s what she wants.”

“She wants you to come and see her,” Sherlock replied. “It’s been a year, after all.”

Joan hadn’t thought about it that way, and when she did, refusal seemed so easy.


	5. Wanweird - An unhappy fate (400 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanweird - An unhappy fate. (Word Meme)

It was never meant to start.

These things have a habit of getting out of hand and they tend to do it quickly.

Rain drips down from the spigot, into a waiting barrel to collect it for no purpose. 

They are on a porch, watching the rain from a swinging chair. Back and forth they rock, until the world blurs at the edges, damp with rain and twisted with the ever-constant motion of the swing. 

She wears black, and Jamie thinks it suits her. More so than most colors, she wears it like a shield against the harsh looks and stern judgment inside. 

“No one expected you to show up to this.”

“Despite our differences, Sherlock is one of my closest associates. I would not see him grieve alone.”

“I’m not sure your presence is going to make him feel any better.” Jamie looks at her companion then, her foot coming down to slow the swing’s motion. 

“One would think you weren’t happy to see me, Joan.” It had started long ago now, and it seems like it is her fate, on some level, to chase this woman across the planet. To feel the pull of her when she’s on the other side of the world, to hate every moment she thinks of her fondly. Jamie hates it all, and yet she cannot, will not, accept anything less. “It’s been a while.”

“I’m not going off with you at a _funeral_.” Her fingers curl around Jamie’s forearm. ”Especially not this one.”

"You were lovers.”

“It was a poor life choice.”

“Then let me present you with a better one, Joan. Come inside with me, let me give my condolences to Sherlock, and we’ll see what he says.” Jamie tilts her head to one side. "The way he presented it to me, he hated the man, thought him a waste of space.“

"He wasn’t that either.” 

“What was he then?”

“A man whose fate wasn’t in his own hands.” Joan tilts her head to one side, hair spilling down her shoulder. 

“He hurt you.”

“He did.”

“Then why do you mourn him?” 

She sighs, gets to her feet and turns away from Jamie. ”Because Sherlock can’t.” She glances over her shoulder. ”That is my fate, to mourn a man who used and hurt me willingly and had no compunction of doing it again.”

Jamie vows then that this will never be her. She will never be so weak, so powerless and so resigned. Joan Watson is lovely, yes, but she lacks something that Jamie knows she should never desire. Ruthlessness, heartlessness, such things would not suit Joan like they suited Jamie.

Like they suited the late Mycroft Holmes.


	6. Apodyopis & Gymnophoria (400 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone.  
> Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you.
> 
> (got a few requests for these both, combined them (400 words)

It is midsummer when she makes the decision that she cannot simply paint Joan Watson. No, she must capture her in stone, or in clay, something with more permanence than paint on canvas laid on so thickly it can never truly dry. 

Jamie is warm and slightly sticky in the city air. A breeze blows in off the street to the little cafe that she has chosen, under an umbrella against the harsh rays of the sun. In the glass before her, ice shifts. It is a quiet sound of settling, barely audible over the sound of cars passing on the street beyond the oasis of this café.

She’s become preoccupied with the line of her companion’s neck and the small bead of sweat that slowly has been working its way down towards her clavicle. She wants to see what would happen, should the bead descend further, to dip down onto the freckled chest that is half-visible under the loose shirt that Watson wears.

She licks her lips, fingers twitching just once. A pigeon lands nearby and starts to make a quiet cooing sound, heading for a lost crumb of bread under the table. Watson tilts her head to one side, chin on her palm and elbow on the table. She lets out a quiet breath of air, and Jamie licks her lips again.

What would she be like, without that shirt clinging to her sweaty body? Jamie reaches forward, fingers touching her dewing glass of her drink. She’d be exquisite. Her freckles would continue; they’d have to, down her body to where they are hidden by clothes. (And Watson’s clothes are infuriating to Jamie on so many levels - the casual grace of them irritating - the way that Jamie wants them off of her with each passing moment maddening.) Jamie sips her tea. It is good, cold, no sugar. Watson had put a sugar packet in her own glass when they’d sat down twenty minutes ago.

Would her skin taste like salt or would the sweetness of the sugar packet linger?

“Stop that.”

Jamie looks up, fingers curled around her glass, her other hand poking at the ice in her cup with her straw. “Mn?”

“Undressing me in your head. Stop." Watson is facing her now, cheek still pillowing on her palm.

"Would you rather I did it in person?" Jamie hedges, all sly smile and charm that she feels must seem obviously put on to Watson.

"No." Watson looks down, cheeks flushed and Jamie’s smile widens. She is not flushed from the heat. "I think that would be a terrible idea.”


	7. "There was, after all, business to be done." (drabble)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Jen] asked: "There was, after all, business to be done."  
> cw: suicide mention

He watched her as she left, hair caught in the late evening breeze, his fingers pressed to his cheek where she pressed a kiss and promised a future she could never offer. She would kill herself tonight, slit her wrists and drown their home in her blood. 

Murder was a bloody business, but it was business that must be done. She was better than this, better than the needle and the drugs she’d left for him, better than the aching pain at her chest, knowing she could not look back.

He was as dead as she was, after all; a ghost walking.


	8. Things you said when we were the happiest we ever were. (1k)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mermaidandthedrunks asked: Joan/Jamie - 19. (yes, I'm forcing you to write something happy/not devastatingly heartbreaking)

Cast aside at the end of the bed was a small packet of papers penned in a child’s hand. It was slipping off the duvet as the bed rocked. They were the remnants of a correspondence, a friendship struck up following a murder. They were an excuse.

“Why?” Came the question twenty minutes earlier with the all the trappings of Moriarty’s subtle tells: the slight furrowing of her eyebrows and the downward pull of pursed lips, confusion. As if she could not comprehend such a gesture.

Why could mean so many things: Why are you here? Why have you brought me these papers? Why do you look so sad?

Why do you keep coming back?

(Why do I feel alive when I see you?)

Joan asked herself that question more than any sane person should.

Moriarty stood aside and allowed Joan entry.

The offer to visit was extended weeks ago. “Come to London. Now that your government has set me free, they wish for me to stay away for a while.” It was scrawled across the back of a postcard depicting Piccadilly Circus.

Sherlock went to three meetings after he took in the mail that day.

Sherlock got high in the bathroom that night.

Joan didn’t go to London.

“I…” Joan looked down at her rain-soaked boots. “I wanted to give you these.” She held out the packet of papers, rain damp and Crayola marker blurring at the edges.

Moriarty regarded the papers as though they might bite.

“Someone had to reach out to her, after what happened.” Joan shrugged off her jacket and draped it over a doorknob. On the sideboard, a purse, ostentatious and oversized, sat. There was a scarf wrapped around the handle and a pistol inside.

“I moved her. No one should have been able to…oh-” She gave a little grunt of realization. “Clever, clever, Joan.”

“You should read them. “They stood in silence for a moment.

Moriarty turned and walked away into the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “What’s the point of dwelling on a might-have-been?”

Joan picked at a speck of mud on her jeans. “Isn’t that what this is? A might-have-been?”

“Why are you here, Joan?”

“I…” Joan sucked in a breath so deep it burned. “I wanted to see you.”

The kettle let out a low hiss and started to wail. The shriek pieced the silence of Moriarty’s sparsely decorated kitchen. Moriarty pulled it from the burner and collected two mugs from the dish drain. “You flew across the ocean and rode in a cab for an hour and a half all because you wanted to see me?”

“Is that so hard to stomach? That I could care? That I could want to see you more than I–”

“He’s back in rehab.” There was no question in Moriarty’s words, just the twist of cruel truth so insightful that it cut Joan to the core. It broke her; it pulled her from the convoluted story of wanting to deliver Kayden’s letters to the woman who birthed her in person. The old grandfather clock in the sitting room let out a single chime, marking the half-hour.

Acid rose in her throat and Joan nodded just once before turning and diving for the sink, a dry heave of her empty stomach. Joan wiped her mouth, saliva smearing across the back of her hand. “How did you know?”

“You forget. I’ve been in your shoes.” A small smile blossomed across Moriarty’s lips, as if she was fond of remembering Sherlock at his worst. Or of knowing she put him there.

“I could never forget that.” She used it to topple Moriarty’s empire.

“Why are you here, Joan?”

There is no easy answer that came to Joan’s mind, as responses usually did during their moments of vocal sparring. She came because she didn’t know where else to go. Because she couldn’t stomach rattling around in that big empty house all alone with her failure to realize the path Sherlock was on. Because maybe she was no better than sleeping with her dearest enemy. Because Moriarty understood, understood better than anyone else what it was like to both be Sherlock and to be with him. Because she and Alfredo had pulled Sherlock up from the bathroom floor and Joan felt like she was going to be sick again just imagining how terribly _real_ that had felt. They’d faked it once, for Moriarty. It was nothing like the real thing.

A dry, wretched noise escaped Joan’s lips. Moriarty’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Joan sucked in a wet breath and made up her mind.

She crossed the kitchen and kissed her, her breath tasted of bile and Moriarty pushed her away. “Brush your teeth; the bathroom is down the hall on the left.” She picked up the packet of papers and turned. “You only had to ask, if forgetting was what you were after.”

Her cheeks burning, Joan collected her bad and headed for the bathroom. She was happy, so happy to see Moriarty, and yet horrified at herself for wanting the companionship of a murderer who drove Sherlock so far down a needle that she was afraid he would never resurface. Was she any better? She had failed to stop it, failed to see the signs. Was her capitulation to the inevitability of his relapse set to be her absolution at the hands of an avowed murderer?

Moriarty was sitting on the bed, her sweater slipping off one shoulder, a drawing of a red spiral of blood and a yellow haired avenger clutched in her hands. Her lips were parted, she looked so very young. A letter was discarded beside her covered in sloppy, childish handwriting.

“Is this how she sees me?”

Joan took the paper from Moriarty’s hands and set it aside. “Sometimes,” and this was her gravest sin, “I think I could see you see you that way too.” She leaned in, kissing at the frown on Moriarty’s lips.

“You’re a fool, Watson.”

“I know.”

Outside, it was pouring rain. 


	9. smock (800 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Joan/Jamie in morning pyjamas after waking up

The distant wail of the kettle woke Joan from unsteady, unsure slumber. She never slept well in new places, and her fingers twisted into cool sheets. It took a moment of objection to the sound; Joan attempting to bury her head beneath the pillow, before she realized that sleep was not coming again. She pushed herself upwards on elbows and brushed mussed hair from her eyes, looking around at the room in daylight.

“Hotels are so impersonal,” She’d been told last night, faced with a coy smile behind a wine glass full of good wine. “Although I do enjoy the anonymity they offer.”

“An apartment would make your residence somewhat permanent,” Joan had replied evenly. “And that is a commitment you aren’t willing to make.”

“Why, my dear Watson, you think you have me all figured out, don’t you?" 

Joan did not, because to think so would be foolish. She wasn’t about to say that, though.

They’d come back to this mostly empty apartment, and fallen into this largely disused bed, what had happened next had been building for close to a year and a half now. 

She rummaged on the floor, finding her underwear under a shoe and feeling bruised and raw as she pulled them on. She had never intended to allow things to get this far, but Joan had never taken into account how much she would want it, want the woman and want to see her come undone. It was an oversight, and now it was something that she could not see past. Thrown haphazardly over the chair there was a discarded shirt - far too big to belong to anyone and streaked with paint. Joan didn’t much feel like putting her dress from last night back on, so she pulled it over her head and padded on bare feet from the room towards the kitchen and the hissing tea-kettle.

There were two cups of tea sitting on the counter, and Moriarty was leaning over a spread-open copy of the Times, smirking slightly as she read the opinion page.

"What are people angry about today?” Joan asked, taking the cup of tea that wasn’t stained a creamy white color with milk and probably an obscene amount of sugar. 

The robe that Moriarty was wearing slipped down her shoulder to reveal skin that Joan had come to know the night before - skin that had been her tell to Sherlock. In one of her letters to Sherlock, she’d told the story of her melanoma, and apologized for removing something he found beautiful about her from her body. Sherlock had been unnerved by it, Joan as well.

“Your president, mostly.” Moriarty replied, folding the paper over to read the world briefs. She doesn’t look up. Joan sipped her tea and watched her move, knowing that there was nothing under that robe. It made her throat feel dry. 

“Usual day then,” Joan answered, blowing on too hot tea and looking around the mostly bare kitchen. The kettle was the only thing that looked like it was used with any regularity, but there were a few apples in a bowl on the end of the counter that looked fresh, and there was apparently milk.

Moriarty looked up then, one hand half-way frozen in the act of reaching for her tea. Her eyes traveled slowly up Joan’s body until they met Joan’s curious gaze with an intense look that did little to remedy the dry feeling at the back of Joan’s throat. “You’re wearing my smock,” Moriarty sounded almost shocked by it. 

Joan looked down at it, and then shrugged. “I didn’t think you would appreciate my rifling through your drawers to find something to wear.”

The sound of rustling paper filled the kitchen as Moriarty turned the page in the newspaper, elbows on the counter now and very pointedly not looking at Joan. “That was… good of you,” Moriarty said at length. She’d sucked her lower lip into her mouth. “I would be careful, though, putting on things that don’t belong to you.”

“And why is that?”

“Because, Joan, their owners might find the need to reclaim them,” Moriarty looked up then, and her eyes were alight with something that sent a warm feeling jolting down Joan’s spine. She closed the paper carefully, stepping forward and taking the tea cup from Joan’s hand. “You wouldn’t want me to take it back, would you?”

And Joan did. She watched as Moriarty set the cup down with a sort of finality, and she let hands slide up and underneath the smock to pull it over her head. 

“I’ve had you, Joan Watson,” Moriarty was saying, muttering into Joan’s neck as the smock fell to the floor. Joan’s hands fumble for the tie on her robe, fingers slipping on silk and fumbling as hands came to rest on her hips. “Why do I still want more?”

It was a question that Joan couldn’t answer. Nor was it one that she thought she wanted to.


	10. raisins ruin everything (4.5k)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> avalencias asked: ok ok I meant: political au. actually conniving jamie moriarty y/y?

_raisins ruin everything (4500, vaguely nsfw)_

*

“–oh and Watson?”

She looked up, buried up to her elbows in papers, bills to review and a few pieces of reporting that she had to read before tomorrow’s floor debate. “What is it, Sherlock?”

“The,” he made a face, fidgeting in the doorway, “ _lobbyist_ from that arts education initiative is here.”

Joan sighed and pulled off her glasses. “I haven’t got time,” she said, tiredly rubbing at her eyes. “Any chance they can come back sometime not right before a big floor debate?”

Sherlock nodded just once and disappeared from view, and Joan went back to her paperwork, her neck and back throbbing with the tension of the day. There were simply not enough hours in the day.

*

She left at ten o'clock that night, escorted by Sherlock, who was busy muttering into his cell phone about Alfredo and Randy and something about a meeting, another meeting, that he’d missed. Joan watched him, knowing that the stress of this debate was getting to him too.

“Go,” she said. “It’s Washington. There’s always a meeting going on." She glanced up the mall, the Washington Monument’s long shadow long in the reflecting pool on this cloudless night. "I’ll be fine to get home.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, already three steps towards the road and hailing a cab.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I could use the walk - clear my head. I have Marcus-” her assigned city police body guard “-on speed dial if I need him." Her place was only about four blocks away, though. She doubted that she’d see anyone but other harassed-looking aides and representatives heading home after spending too long at the office.

He smiled, almost. He never really smiled or showed much emotion at all. That was not why he was with Joan, or Joan was with him. They took care of each other. They kept each other safe. They cultivated the little niche that she’d carved out for herself and let it flourish as best that they could.

The looming doom of reelection always lingered, and Joan felt it over her head even now. Her district was changing, gentrifying. She knew that the outlook wasn’t good. She wasn’t white and the polling numbers of the over privileged yuppie disease that had infected the whole of the place that she called home do not swing in her favor. She had to do something, and the desperation was starting to get to her.

*

Ten minutes of walking and a second figure fell into step beside Joan. "People don’t usually blow me off." The pronouncement came with an amused chuckle and a brush of fingers against Joan’s hand, hung limp by her side as she tried, and failed, not to engage.

"I don’t want your money,” she said through clenched teeth. It came with too many strings attached, and she and who she represented - they did a lot more than change the outcomes of elections. “I’m not someone who can be bought.”

“Oh come now, Joan, everyone has a price,” she replied with a flash of icy blue eyes and an upwards quirk of lips. “I figured out Sherlock’s easily enough, what makes you think I can’t figure out yours?”

Joan sucked in a sharp breath of air. “Your near dismantling of Sherlock’s life has done absolutely nothing to endear me to you,” she said in one quick string of words. “Now, please, I don’t want to see you.”

“That arts education initiative actually has a chance to win you brownie points in your district, Watson,” she stopped walking, standing with hands in her long trench coat’s pockets. “You should at least look at it before you dismiss me out of hand.”

The look that Joan threw over her shoulder as she walked away said, ‘you kill people for a living when you’re selling deals to the devil with your silver tongue.' She worked for bad people, she was a bad person. And the last thing that Joan wanted was mob ties so close to the start of her reelection campaign.

*

The arts education initiative polled extremely well, and Joan hated herself for typing up the rider and attaching it to the bill after some finagling with Gregson and Hudson - her fellow borough reps. They both thought that it would tank the bill because, “everyone knows that the republicans will never fund the arts, Watson, why you’re even bothering is beyond me.”

Joan sat in her office after arguing her point with a smug-looking representative from Kentucky for several hours, seething mad. She was clear and concise and he’d attempted to undercut her entire argument with claims of 'liberal elite’ and 'minority bias’ and 'women don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to education’ which Joan thought was pretty back-ass-wards. The guy was a pig who cheated on his wife with pretty much anything with legs.

Joan was tempted, sorely tempted, to break into her book of congressional blackmail, but she knew it would be too obvious. Still, she’d gotten in her two cents and her rebuttal of his sexist, racist remarks was already up to almost a hundred thousand views on youtube.

“She got to you,” Sherlock said, coming in and presenting her with a cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” she said, taking it from him and letting him perch on the edge of her desk. “And she didn’t. I actually told her to get lost.”

He raised an eyebrow, pant legs riding up and socks with flying pigs printed on them coming into view. Joan thought that that was almost fitting. “Bu _t_ –?” he asked, drawing out the ’t’ at the end of the word.

“But it polled well and there was no harm in introducing it. There are no traces of her… employer on it. It’s funded through a surplus in the school’s actual budget that was being kept in reserve to purchase new playground equipment, but that had…” Joan stopped, her lips turning downwards into an annoyed scowl.

“Had?” Sherlock prompted, and he sounded almost sad.

“Been donated by an anonymous donor,” Joan shook her head, a self-deprecating smile on her lips. “ _Fuck_ , I’m an idiot." She glanced up at Sherlock, his mouth half-open to say something. "Don’t you even start,” she said, jabbing him in the chest with her finger.

*

“I wish you wouldn’t do underhanded things to get my attention,” Joan announced to the apparently empty conference room that she was scheduled to have a meeting in for the next half hour. “It makes me… look weak.”

“You already are weak, Watson. You’re well-liked, though, so you get something of a pass from your colleagues." She was leaning against the far window, looking out over the mall, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked almost sad, but Joan knew better. The woman was a poison, a corrosive force to all that she touched.

And she had her eyes set on Joan.

"What do you want from me, really?” Joan asked, hedging her bets and hoping for honesty. She didn’t expect it, wasn’t sure she wanted it.

“The pleasure of your company, Joan Watson,” came the reply. She moved from the window to stand before Joan, her eyes downcast, subservient when they should have been full of a fire that Joan found utterly terrifying. “Surely by now you’ve figured out?”

“That you and your quote employer are one in the same?” Joan met her gaze evenly, looking for weakness. There was none to be had, save the darkening of pupils and the flare of nostrils that Joan knew had absolutely nothing to do with that. “Sherlock and I figured that out ages ago - we were trying to figure out why.”

“Do I need a reason?”

It was not the question that Joan expected. She faltered, looked down at her hands, clenched them into fists and looked back up. She didn’t suppose that an entity as powerful and as corrupting as Moriarty really does. She swallowed and kept her face neutral; the reaction was what she was craving, Joan knew this. “I would like one.”

And when Moriarty leaned across the space between them, her lips so close, hovering, but never pressing forward. “It would be bad form,” she drawled, breath hot on Joan’s face. “To get caught up in the moment of a grand romantic gesture without your consent.”

She was holding out the keys to her kingdom in the offer of a single kiss.

Joan pulled back. “It would, you’re right,” she said, looking away, fumbling for words.

Nothing more was said that day.

*

“But what does she _want_ , Sherlock?" Joan cradled her head in her hands, elbows digging almost painfully into her knees. "I am not even a powerful rep - and don’t you dare tell me she’s looking for a patsy.”

He said nothing for a long time, lower lip sucked into his mouth and half-bouncing on his toes. Eventually he turned to look at her, his eyes still sad. “I think,” he said at length, “That she finds you interesting. You do not show her fear, and you’ve figured out exactly who she is.”

Joan looked up, one hand still buried in her hair. “We figured out who she is together.”

“I think you’ll find, Watson, that it was you who figured it out. She is a bit of a… blind spot for me,” Sherlock shook his head. “She likes matching her wits against yours. You let her win with the education initiative, it’s time for you to volley back and reset the match.”

“Do you have any idea how weird is it to hear you make a sports metaphor?" Joan asked him, her brow furrowed as she tried to figure out if he’d combined two sports to make it.

He wiggled his eyebrows with her. "Shall I try and get Ms. Hudson on the phone to discuss that water rights proposition?”

Joan sighed, loudly and broadly. There was very little that could bore Joan quicker than water rights. They were, as Marcus would say almost fondly when describing any walking disaster, a hot mess. “Might as well.”

*

Joan surprised her on a Monday morning early, with two muffins from the bakery around the corner from her apartment, and tea that she made at home before heading out. It wasn’t as though the office was a secret, but Joan could tell when she was shown in by a grim-faced secretary that looked like he’d be better off in some mob movie that she had shocked her.

“You brought me breakfast?" she asked, eyebrows climbing up her forehead.

Shrugging, Joan set one of the two cups down in front of her. "I was in the neighborhood.”

They were half-way though their breakfast before Moriarty tilted her head to one side. “You really shouldn’t be seen here, Watson, not if you want to keep your scruples.”

“I know,” Joan said. She picked a raisin from her muffin and set it onto the napkin beside it, wrinkling her nose. “I wanted to ask you if you would maybe extend me…” she trailed off, meeting Moriarty’s intense gaze. “The same sort of courtesy?" She glanced around - the degrees on the wall, more than Joan’s ever seen one person have. The art, the expensive, probably authentic art. The scary mafia goon secretary. "I know who you are and what you do-”

“And yet you’ve not turned me in, have you Joan?" She wrapped her lips around Joan’s name like it was something obscene and Joan’s cheeks burned just looking at them. "Why is that?”

Joan swallowed, not daring to call it what it was - an oversight, a moment of temporary insanity, penchant for poor life choices - but not knowing what else to say. “Call it a whim.”

Moriarty smirked. “I think you like me.”

She had no response for that.

*

They ended up working together a few more times before the summer recess and Joan honestly wasn’t really all that bothered. Her name, they had finally figured out, was Jamie. Sherlock thought it was utterly pedestrian, and Joan thought it was far too innocent for her. “She kills people; she’s the worst sort of fixer.”

“She’s not a fixer, Sherlock,” Joan had pointed out. “She’s a great mind bored out of her skull. We should be grateful she wasn’t born here - otherwise I’m pretty sure she’d already be president.”

Now though, they were sitting at something of a détente between the pair of them. Joan wasn’t about to budge, and Moriarty certainly was going to give no ground. A desperate feeling pooled at the base of Joan’s stomach every time she or Sherlock caught sight of Moriarty around town, pretending to be a normal lobbyist. Joan _wanted_ to know why Moriarty had singled her out, the need consumed her as she tried to go to about her business.

“Maybe this is her plan,” Sherlock suggested one afternoon. “To have you eating yourself up inside, trying to figure out her game. She plays for the long haul, Watson, it won’t come as easy as a simple guess.” 

Joan looked up at him, one hand cradling her head and the other twirling a pen in her hand. “Do you really think so?”

“Why not take the help, but when she asks for the favor – which she undoubtedly will – in return, deny her?” 

“It doesn’t work like that,” Joan replied sadly. She had entered this dance – this _game -_ of Moriarty’s willingly. Taking the breakfasts and the occasional ambush with takeout was one thing, but knowingly, willingly, taking Moriarty’s advice on legislation was something else entirely. Joan wouldn’t, and she didn’t. Moriarty, she thought, knew that.

He made an affirmative noise, and his fingers brushed against her shoulder as he left the room. Joan was left alone with her papers and her thoughts, without an answer in sight.

*

“Why me?” It was the height of summer, and they were back in New York, sitting on a shady bench in Central Park – far, far away from anyone who would know them. Joan was drinking cold coffee; Moriarty was looking at the dewing plastic cup as though it had somehow personally offended her. “I get that you like me, you like the sparring or whatever – but you clearly must want more than that. I don’t really get it, Jamie,” she continued, chancing a glance over at Moriarty to watch her reaction to Joan’s carefully measured deployment of her first name. “I don’t sit on any important committees; my funding is constantly gutted by Defense or Agriculture. Education isn’t something that people in this country care about anymore.”

Moriarty watched her through eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. “Maybe I just _like_ you Joan. Did that never occur to you?”

Joan sipped her coffee. “After what you did to Sherlock, I don’t think I could ever trust you to not have the same end goal in mind for me.”

She leaned over then, sunglasses shoved up so that Joan could see her eyes, and they were soft for the briefest of moments before they darkened and Moriarty was close, too close. It was too hot to be this close to someone else and Joan opened her mouth to protest. A finger landed on it there, gentle, friendly. “I want to kiss you, Joan, to shut you up.”

“Then why are you asking?” Joan demanded, pulling away from the offending finger and glaring at Moriarty. 

“Because, Joan Watson,” Moriarty drawls, one hand coming to rest on Joan’s shoulder and pulling her back in. “It is polite to ask.” Her eyebrows were raised slightly, a challenge in her eyes. Joan dipped her chin just once, and then Moriarty’s lips were on her’s and it felt _good._

*

They didn’t go back to the brownstone that Joan shared with Sherlock when they were in town, instead favoring a hotel that Moriarty had booked in Midtown. It was closer, at any rate. Joan didn’t know if she could last an entire cab ride back to Brooklyn with Jamie Moriarty’s hands getting far too friendly with the hem of her skirt.

“I should hate you,” Joan said, grinding it out between kisses in the elevator. “For what you’re surely going to do to me.”

What Moriarty did was push her into the room and pin her against the wall, one hand pulling up Joan’s skirt and the other at the back of Joan’s neck, holding her head there as she pressed a kiss that was tongue and teeth and pain and everything that Joan had never known she wanted from something like this. “I’m going to ruin you, Joan Watson,” Moriarty hissed into Joan’s ear. She kicked the door closed and pressed her fingers upwards to where Joan was sure her underwear were almost embarrassingly wet. “And then I am going rebuild you from scratch. Take you apart,” she breathed. She pressed her fingers against the fabric, her lips trailing against Joan’s ear. A chuckle escaping her lips as Joan dug her fingers into the back of Moriarty’s shirt. Joan let out a low hiss and pushed forward, into Moriarty’s touch. “Put you back together again.”

Joan let her.

*

“You had sex with my ex-girlfriend,” Sherlock scowled when Joan completed the walk of shame up the brownstone steps and took the day’s agenda from him with a half-hearted smile. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Watson. This is going to end so badly.”

“I know,” Joan said, wishing that she could not hear about it, just for a little while. Her mind had screamed rebellion all night and into the morning, five times they’d gone. Joan didn’t think she slept more than an hour. “What’s this meeting?”

“Oh, that’s the speech you’re going to be giving to the youth center connected to the First Lutheran. About how _not sleeping with murderers_ will keep them away from a life of crime and misery,” Sherlock explained, heading towards the stairs and what Joan could only presume was coffee. 

It seemed almost fitting, that she’d have _that_ particular speaking engagement on the schedule for today.

*

The campaign heated up through August and Joan saw very little of Moriarty at all. She was too focused on reelection, on convincing all the scared white people in her district that yes, Asians were the “model minority,” no matter how much she hated the stereotype; and no, her deranged British assistant was not going to kidnap their children should she want to pose for pictures with them. 

“I thought that the gentrification of this area was supposed to be full of open minded people,” Sherlock grumbled after the fourth dirty look he’d gotten while passing within a five foot radius of a small child at a community dinner. “There’s nothing about me that screams ‘recovering drug addict’ is there?”

“No, there isn’t, but these people read the papers, Sherlock. It was all over them,” Joan replied, sitting down next to him and enjoying a quiet moment to simply breathe and shove some food in her mouth before the next hour of fake smiling and handshakes commenced. 

She was running on a campaign similar to her last one that had been so successful, and so far the numbers were good. No one particularly cared for her opponent – but Joan was pretty sure it was because he looked like the Irish mob had spat him out of Boston on the plane back with the Yankees or something. She, at least, was approachable. Deranged British assistant notwithstanding, naturally. 

“I heard from her yesterday,” Sherlock said quietly during a lull in the conversation. “Wanted to talk to you about Laner’s campaign in Bridgeport.”

Jon Laner, the one person of the northeastern delegation that Joan could not stand. He was in serious danger of losing his seat, too, if he wasn’t careful. “What about it?” Joan asked.

Sherlock shrugged. “She wouldn’t say, just that she had to see you." He shot Joan a dirty look. "If I am running interference on some sort of booty call, please feel free to take care of your own messages until you two can resolve-” he made a vague gesture to the space in front of Joan ”-whatever it is that’s going on between you.“

Joan stuck her tongue out at him. "I’m sure it’s not that.”

He sniffed. “Quite.”

*

They met in the back of a town car, because people were actually paying attention to the pair of them now. Joan had been careful, doubly so in recent weeks, and Moriarty doesn’t like to be seen, even when she was pretending to only work for the faceless entity that was Moriarty to the casual observer. She leaned against the window, as much space as she could put between herself and Moriarty’s sinful smile as possible.

“What about Laner?” Joan asked.

“Oh good, I wasn’t sure that Sherlock was going to give you the message. He hung up on me,” Moriarty’s lips twisted downward, looking almost disappointed. She bent then, reached into the briefcase at her feet and unearthed a plain brown envelope. “I need you to distance yourself from him, Joan.”

“I hate the man,” Joan felt the need to point out, in case Moriarty hadn’t already figured that out.

“I know,” Moriarty replies. “But your name, however tangentially, is connected to this as well. I need you to get out ahead of it. I don’t your career ruined because Jonathan Laner cannot keep his hands to himself.”

What went unsaid was just who he needed to stay away from, and Joan felt sick as she looked at the pictures. “This… should land him in jail." Joan said, shoving them back at Moriarty and sucking in a deep breath. "How the hell is my name connected to something like… like _that_?”

“He met that young man at your most recent fundraiser dinner,” Moriarty said, setting the envelope onto her lap and folding her hands primly on top of him.

“Oh _god_ ,” Joan groaned. Buried her head in her hands, tried to remember to breathe. This is so very, very bad. “Were you hired to–”

She looked up, all blonde hair and flashing blue eyes. There was anger in her eyes, annoyance that Joan had implied that about her. “Make it go away? Certainly not, darling. I have something of a professional reputation to maintain, after all. The scandals that I fix go far beyond petty indiscretions with barely legal young men.”

Moriarty killed people for a living, and not metaphorically. Joan bit the inside of her lip, trying to force herself to remember that fact. “Why tell me then, why not sink my career?”

“Because I like you, Joan, and you don’t deserve to have Laner’s stink on you.”

*

She got reelected, secured funding for the start of her next campaign, and headed back to Washington. Laner’s career was the punch line of many jokes for both Jon Stewart and Bill O'Riley for weeks, and Joan had skated free and clear of any potential involvement. Things were… quiet.

Too quiet.

*

In January, Joan was presented with a bill that would be impossible to ever get out of committee. There were riders for dams and roads and some odd gun regulation that she had to run by someone from the NSA just to make sure that it was legal. The gist of the bill was actually good. Funding for math and science excellence, forgiveness of student loans if students of math and science in college taught it for five years. A good bill, a solid bill, and one that would never see the light of day.

She stuck it in a drawer, and went to meet Jamie for dinner.

It was the biggest mistake of her life.

*

Joan’s career almost ended with a bang, a picture on the back page of the New York Post - her fingers curled at the nape of Jamie Moriarty’s neck and her back pressed against a brick wall not too far from her office. They were kissing, coming back from that dinner that Joan almost didn’t go to. 

“I never meant for this,” Jamie confessed as Joan stared down at her doom. “I had much loftier plans for your downfall; pity a paparazzo beat me to the punch.”

Scowling, Joan turned to glare at her, irritation spiking as Jamie lounged stark white pillows, a smug smile on her face. “What were you planning?” even though she did not want to know.

“I was going to let you become Secretary of Education, he was going to tap you, you know. Before all this,” Jamie answered, pushing herself up into a sitting position and crossing her legs. “Maybe let you maybe do some good, and then I was going to appear - your girlfriend, maybe more than that by then." She gave Joan a meaningful look and Joan swallowed, trying not to think about the easy companionship of these days and nights and how easy it would have been to do it forever. "By being ‘gay’ you’d lose the respect of your mother’s generation, certainly - probably as well as a substantial portion of the minority vote in your district.”

“Sec Ed is an appointed position, Jamie,” Joan pointed out.

“The plan was very much in progress, Joan,” Jamie replied curtly. “I wasn’t even sure I was going to go through with any of it.”

_The New York Post_ , however, had forced both of their hands.

*

They were screaming for her to step down, lesbian scandal with a known mob associate, Colbert had a field day with her. Joan actually went on to The Daily Show just to piss him off and explained that it sucks being outed, even if her girlfriend had less than savory connections. It didn’t help much, but what didn’t help more was that Jamie disappeared off to Peru to 'take care of something’ and effectively only threw more wood onto the fire with her very pointed absence.

It was only when Jamie returned, bearing bruises and scars and a broken wrist, that Joan realized that the scandal was bad for her, but it effectively neutered Jamie’s ability to possess anonymity.

“I killed them all,” Jamie said, collapsing into Joan’s arms as Sherlock ran for the first aid kit. “I killed them because I can’t murder the American press.”

“Also, I hope, because they were bad people?” Joan ventured.

Jamie reached up with her good arm, fingers brushing against Joan’s face. “Oh, the worst sort.”

*

Maybe it was the bruises and the broken wrist, the next time they dared venture out in public, that actually won Joan her seat for the next term. They never said, outright, that it was a gay bashing - because that would have been a lie. It was just the implication that won her sympathy, impassioned rants by Maddow and others.

Joan looked Jamie in the eye across the low table of their favorite cafe, fingers steadily removing raisins from her muffin. “You were going to dismantle my life.”

“I was.”

“Why didn’t you?” Another raisin removed. Raisins ruined everything.

“Because I like you, Joan Watson.”

And somehow, that was enough for Joan.


	11. killing time (800 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Student/Teacher / the mentoring you in xyz way.

It begins as a way to kill time.

Their work is the perfect hurry up and wait profession, after all. Only this time their usual comfortable silent duo is a trio and it’s weird.

They are, as it so happens, stuck on a stakeout of a fairly remote clearing up in the Adirondacks near Dannemora. They’re staying in a cabin not too far away from the clearing and watching it in three hour shifts, waiting for the small prop plane to come in during a very specific window of time off of Lake Champlain carry with is, reportedly, a large amount of heroin to be sold across Vermont and Upstate New York.

Sherlock is taking his shift, and the radio is silent on the table between them and Joan keeps eyeing it, trying to will something to happen.

Moriarty had waltzed in to the investigation in sky-high heels and a business-like manner as she informed Captain Gregson, in no uncertain terms, what was killing their three young kids - addicts all of them. “Bad tar,” she’d said, wrinkling her nose. “I know the supplier and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather he be behind bars.”

They are a far cry from the creature comforts of the city. Moriarty is sitting in a fuzzy sweater that Joan thinks might have been Sherlock’s at one point (it’s definitely his style, and Moriarty would be the type to appropriate clothing) and comfortable looking socks, doodling on a legal pad and distractedly reading something from the police report on Joan’s iPad. 

“How old were you,” Joan asks, apropos of nothing because she’s learned that with people like Sherlock, like Moriarty, it’s easier to surprise them into honesty. “When you learned to draw?”

Moriarty looks up, hair caught frizzing around her face in a messy bun that is nothing like her usual, put-together self. Joan supposes that they are, essentially, camping and some sacrifices must be made. “I was seven,” she says, reaching up and flicking off the iPad. “But I didn’t take any formal classes until I was fourteen." It’s the way she says it that has Joan’s mind full of images of tutors and Moriarty at an impossibly young age sitting on the edge of a very high stool painting flowers and jugs and fruits carefully arranged on a table in front of her. It seems so very mundane, but Joan is starting to learn that Moriarty doesn’t lead the life of a high-flying Bond-villain. She’s as boring as Joan or Sherlock, most of the time, and the three of them have settled into this already three-day long stake out almost seamlessly. 

(Joan suspects that the patchy cell phone reception and lack of wi-fi are probably doing works to keeping them getting along. With no evil criminal organization to manage [and Moriarty has tried, standing out on the roof, waving her phone around trying to send email], Moriarty reads and doodles and drinks an unhealthy amount of tea.)

"Could you teach me?” Joan asks, because she’d spent her entire academic career wanting to be a doctor and never had had any time to learn how to draw anything beyond a sketch a protein molecule or a crude picture of a bone structure. 

It earns her a tilted head to one side, a scrape of a chair and Moriarty settling down beside her. Joan is now sure, given the proximity, that she’s wearing one of Sherlock’s sweaters. Their elbows brush against each other and Moriarty flicks a pencil expertly around her thumb before tugging the pad towards her. “Draw the radio,” she says.

“Why?” Joan asks.

“Just do it, Watson,” Moriarty answers. She produces another pencil from the pouch she’d brought with her to the table and draws a neat line across the pad before her with her left hand. It almost figures that she’d be able to do this with both hands. 

They draw the same thing, and afterwards, Moriarty starts talking about light and perspective and she’s showing Joan how to change the angle of her line to alter how it appears to the eye. 

Sherlock comes back some two hours later, to find them both staring intently at a crumpled piece of paper, Joan’s phone standing on end and the flashlight app on to create some extreme shadows, each dutifully drawing what they see. He gets a third piece of paper and joins them, because there is a specific window for the plane to come through, undetected by radar out of Burlington, Plattsburgh or Albany. They’ve got until six twenty tomorrow morning before someone has to go watch the clearing. 

Somehow the night ends with them playing Pictionary and Joan feeling… oddly content with the situation. Sherlock’s just as bad as she is at drawing stuff and it’s weird. Like they’re in a dream and soon set to wake up. 

(Joan, later that night as she heads towards bed, thinks that maybe she doesn’t to go back to a world where everything is so much more complicated than it is now. She likes the quiet and the ease of this. It shouldn’t be easy, and yet it is.)


	12. stay (2k nsfw)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Joan x Moriarty; trying new things in bed

The first time it happens, they’re locked in a private conference room supposedly consulting for a case. What’s really happening is that Sherlock is slowly falling apart and has taken a “minute for air” before they try and figure out this stupidly complicated problem that had them calling in Moriarty in the first place. Moriarty is leaning in too close, daring her, teasing her, taunting her that she’s had Sherlock when Joan has not. Joan feels trapped, hurt, angry at Moriarty for making the entirely wrong assumption about her.

“He’s a good man,” Moriarty is saying, and her jacket riding up as she moves her hand about. Joan can see the grip of a gun protruding from the waistband of her pants. She wonders if Sherlock knows it’s there, and knows that he must know, that he’s letting it happen for some strange reason that Joan can’t fathom. “And an excellent lover, Watson…” The way she says it is all implication and barely veiled contempt, like she cannot believe that Joan’s not had Sherlock yet.

Joan wants to hit her, to do something to make her understand that isn’t what she wants out of Sherlock. Her anger seethes inside of her, threatening to bubble over, to wrap her fingers around Moriarty’s neck and squeeze until there’s no air left in those lungs to sling the lies she spits out so easily. 

But she has a gun, and hitting people isn’t really Joan’s style. She looks away, at Moriarty’s stupidly expensive and impractical shoes, “I’m not interested,” she says. 

Moriarty scoffs. “Oh,” she says, “I highly doubt that.”

And Joan doesn’t want to do it, but it’s the only thing she can think of to get her point across without slapping Moriarty across the face (not that that does not have a certain charm). She reaches forward and grabs Moriarty by the front of her jacket, catching her by surprise if the indignant noise she makes is anything to go by.

“I’m not interested,” she says again, as Moriarty stumbles in her stupid shoes and their hips bump against each other. Moriarty looks up at her then, and she looks so impossibly young. Her eyelashes flutter just so and Joan wants to hit her all over again. She bites back the urge, fingers smoothing down the front of Moriarty’s shirt. “In men.”

“Oh,” Moriarty says, and Joan watches, horrified, as she changes from mocking to coy almost instantaneously. “Darling, you should have _said_ something.” She eyes Joan’s lips as though she’s weighing the decision and Joan, in what she will describe later as a fit of absolute insanity, leans forward and kisses her. She wants to be the one to do it, if this is what it takes to get her point across.

The kiss is not gentle, nor is it short lived. Moriarty bites, uses her teeth when she should use her tongue. Her hands are tangled in Joan’s hair, pushing her back until she’s half sitting on the conference table behind them. What Joan remembers later is her eyes, her eyes never lose their coldness, their steely resolve, and it’s amazing, how Joan thinking she could turn the tables on Moriarty gets so completely and utterly out of hand so quickly.

Moriarty has Joan on the conference table, her skirt around her waist and her nails digging through Moriarty’s shirt. Moriarty’s jacket (and gun) had fallen to the floor some time ago. It is a culmination of all that they feel about each other, really, the mutual loathing, the desperation. _It is a thin line_ , Joan thinks hazily as her hips buck upwards and she’s tugging Moriarty into another kiss, _between the two extremes of us._

She comes in a mess of half-completed thoughts and a breathy gasp of “ _Jamie,”_ that sounds almost like a surrender. Moriarty is licking her fingers smugly, rocking back in a piece of body language so similar to Sherlock that Joan feels the bile rise up in her chest. “You know,” she says, looking down at Joan as she breathes though the aftershocks of orgasm. “I have no idea why we didn’t do this sooner.”

Joan sits up, exhaustion and self-loathing forgotten, and grabs her by the shirt. They’re pressed together again and Joan’s fingers are pushing up and into Moriarty before Joan has time to fully realize what she’s doing - what _they’re_ doing.

Joan is so disgusted with herself afterwards that she stays in the shower, water as hot as she can handle, until all the hot water is gone. She wears a turtleneck sweater that she hasn’t touched since college to cover the marks on her neck, and smears concealer over the worst of them.

She’d been weak and it would never happen again.

*

The second time it happens they’re in Washington, DC, a favor for a friend of Sherlock’s, staking out a club for potential drug dealers and it comes easier - harder, her back rammed against the stall door of the disgusting nightclub bathroom. It hurts that time, because Moriarty’s starting to learn where to go, what to do, and Joan cannot stomach how easy this seems all of a sudden.

She lets Moriarty kiss her with wicked intent and knows that she’s falling - failing - and that this will make her miserable come morning. She wants it though, wants that rough explosion of passion and desperate longing. It is something that she should not want at all, and yet she’s desperate for it. Desperate for all that it cannot mean.

"You know,” Moriarty whispers, tongue flicking into Joan’s ear. “We could always tell him what we’re doing." She presses more fully against Joan and Joan’s got her fingers tangled up in her hair and fuck if the hand that’s slowly dancing up her thigh doesn’t feel amazing. "Knowing him as intimately,” and with that she nips at Joan’s earlobe, fingers twisting around the fabric of Joan’s underwear to touch her. Joan’s head slams back against the stall door and she cannot believe that she’s letting this happen at all. “- as I do, I would suspect he’d rather enjoy watching.”

Joan freezes then, hands tensing, relaxing. She closes her eyes and pulls Moriarty’s face to hers, leveling the best glare she can, and kisses her. Moriarty’s fingers slip inside as she smiles into the kiss, lips mocking even when they are pressed to Joan’s and her teeth are biting into Joan’s lower lip. 

Groaning, her hips canting up and into the touch, Joan tries to pull away from the kiss long enough to tell her to shut up. This is everything she should not want and it’s everything she should. She’s not even entirely sure why Moriarty’s there, in the club, and she knows that she _should_ ask. 

Moriarty’s lips curl around her tongue and she’s so deliberate with how she moves her fingers, her wrist. It’s meant to drag out, to make Joan scream – and they’re in a fucking nightclub bathroom for christ’s sake. “Jamie,” she says, because it’s easier than saying Moriarty and Joan doesn’t want to think too hard about who’s grinding their palm against her clit right now. She wants the release, the getting off, the mutual loathing. It’s the loathing that feels so stupidly good. “Jamie, we can’t keep doing this.”

“Oh?” Moriarty says, and her lips are back against Joan’s ear, her entire weight thrust against Joan’s now. “And why is that?” Her hand never slows and her teeth are biting at Joan’s neck in a way that she knows will show no matter what she does to hide it. 

Joan can’t think of the worst to reply, can scarcely breathe for want of release now, and Moriarty’s thigh is between hers now, extra pressure and added friction. She wants to say no, to say stop, and she’s sure that Moriarty would. That’s what makes this so bad, because it’s a mutual thing. Joan wants this just as much as she does – probably for all the wrong reasons too.

“Shouldn’t-” is all Joan can get out before she comes, biting down hard on Moriarty’s shoulder, one hand desperately tugging Moriarty closer, the other pulling at her hair. She groans out her release, and Moriarty’s laughing, bracing herself against the stall door and twisting her wrist. 

“Tell me, Watson,” she says, eyes flashing dangerously, “Can you go again?”

Joan swallows, already caught up in an aftershock pushed towards a second go, and nods just once. She can go as long as Moriarty can, if not longer. There’s a competitive streak in her that she has never really been good at hiding, and Moriarty brings it out in her like no one Joan’s ever been with before.

Twenty minutes later when she slides in next to Sherlock and he actually does a double take looking at her, Joan thinks she can swallow the shame of it. She doesn’t tell Sherlock where she’s been, but he obviously knows something happened. He makes sure she hasn’t been assaulted and lets it drop, but he doesn’t stop looking at her out of the corners of his eyes for the rest of the night.

*

The third time it’s a hotel in Midtown and it’s the middle of the day. They’re not doing this on purpose - running into each other. It had been entirely coincidental. Not even Moriarty’s _that_ good a liar and Joan’s not about to go looking for her. They’d met, quite by chance, coming out of a bookstore at the same time through different doors. She’s clutching a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ and she jokes that she should paint an A on Joan’s chest.

“Or maybe an M,” she says after a moment and a peek into Joan’s bag to see her latest book recommendation from her mother and a volume of short stories that Oren had suggested based on their shared appreciation of all things a little bizarre and creepy.

“For what?” Joan asks. “Murderer? I should put that on you.”

It’s angrier that time, and Joan has bruises on her hips for weeks. Her back is a canvas of scratches and bite marks.

Moriarty watches her, afterwards, as she’s getting dressed. She’s bleeding at the corner of her lip, and Joan doesn’t remember where that came from. She raises two fingers to her swollen lip, wipes off the blood. “I don’t usually go for repeat performances, Watson,” she says as Joan tugs her shirt over her head. 

“Oh?” Joan says in a disinterested voice, still only halfway into her shirt. “Why’s that?”

There’s an intensity about her when Joan gets her shirt over her head, her eyes are narrowed and she’s staring at Joan as though she’s trying to see straight through her. “It isn’t often that I find someone worth having more than once,” she confesses, tugging up the duvet to cover her chest. “You are truly a marvel, Joan Watson.”

Joan leaves with her heart hammering in her chest and a ringing in her ears.

*

The fourth and fifth times are actually in Joan’s bed. Sherlock has to go to Albany and Boston and she shows up the second he’s gone. They have the entire house to themselves and Joan’s not about to go through with it but it comes so easily and she’s falling apart almost effortlessly. Her life is reduced to one feeling, one motion and her back arching into touches that she knows better than to want.

It’s a messy morning of Joan’s tongue curling and Moriarty’s fingers tugging at her hair, pulling her ever closer. It’s the late night before of trying something that Joan isn’t sure she wants to accept. “I enjoy control, Watson, what is to say that I won’t enjoy being out of it as well?”

Joan makes her hold a paperclip just to be safe, tells her words to say if it gets to be too much. She spends the night not committing the act that she’s privately decided leaves Moriarty at her most beautiful. She coaxes her to the edge and stops, gets up, walks away, reads her book or checks her email, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed as Moriarty squirms and glares at her. 

“Finish it,” she pleads by the end, when Joan’s let her hands go and they’re clinging to Joan like she’s the one thing keeping Moriarty in the present.

And Joan does and it feels much the same as it always has, but the dynamic has shifted, and they both seem to know it. She lies, ankles locked together and her knees bent so they’re not hanging off the end of the bed, and she lets that shift wash over her as Moriarty’s thighs start to shake and the hands in her hair tug more insistently at her hair. “There,” she groans out. “Please.”

*

The sixth time, it’s four in the morning the next day and Jamie’s getting up and out of bed. Joan’s hand shoots out, catching at her hip and pulling her back down, half asleep still. “Stay,” she says, because it’s cold and Jamie is warm and somehow she’s become Jamie in all this and it’s so weird and new that maybe this is what’s needed.


	13. stale conversation deserves but a bread knife (1.1k)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: 'i'm pretending to be ur bff bc u looked VERY uncomfortable with that person at the bar hitting on u' AU MORE LIKE SOMETHING YOU SHOULD WRITE SO I CAN LOVE YOU FOREVER

“– and I was thinking that maybe I could buy you a drink?”

Joan looks up from where crew-cut Fratty Banker Douchebag with rolled up sleeves and a shirt that has clearly been bought a size too big to hide his growing beer-belly is leaning up against the bar. He’s at least ten years younger than her, and he probably has no idea that he’s been hitting on an older woman for the better part of ten minutes despite Joan’s best efforts to ignore him. She tries to smile politely at him, but it comes off as a bit of a grimace. “I’m really not interested,” she says, and turns back to try and get the bartender’s attention. It’s proving difficult.

Joan is here because she can’t drink a glass of wine at home without worrying about what might happen should Sherlock be around the alcohol. Usually this bar is not crowded, or full of douchebags who can’t take a goddamn hint. It’s been a bit of a rough week and she just wants to unwind, alone, without interruption.

Fratty Banker Douchebag leans in close enough for Joan to get a whiff of Axe body spray and she is reminded of Oren in middle school so violently that she has to turn her face away and the guy has the audacity to poke her shoulder. He does it again and Joan’s going to take her baton to his fingers. “Oh come on, babe, you’re sitting here alone, you’re gorgeous. Let a guy try?”

She turns back to him then, a scowl blossoming on her lips. “Did you miss the part where I said I wasn’t interested?" He opens his mouth and closes it a few times and Joan adds, because she can’t resist it. This is really not the sort of bar to be trying this shit in anyway. "Because when a woman says no, you probably should fuck off.”

He recoils, and Joan sighs, there’s just no reasoning with some people. She’s not about to censor herself because speaking with a foul tongue upsets men. They can deal with it. “No need to get pissy, bitch." He reaches for his vodka tonic - the bartender’s noticed him, Joan scowls. "Never met a girl who’d say no to free booze before.”

“So you could what, slip something in it? No, thank you.”

He reaches out, fingers curling around Joan’s upper arm. “Now listen here,” he says, and he’s in her face, breath smelling of cheap vodka and stale cigarettes that are barely masked by the bath in Axe he’s apparently taken. Joan’s fingers tighten around the baton in her purse. “I don’t apprecia–”

A voice cuts over the din of music and conversation, and it’s the voice that makes Joan’s eyes flutter shut, the feeling of unmitigated dread settling over her like blanket of snow, masking everything else to the point of being unrecognizable. “Joanie!” Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Jamie Moriarty cuts through the crowd to stand beside Joan, looping her arm around Joan’s and lying through her fucking teeth. “There you are, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I thought we were supposed to meet outside, not at the bar." She glances up at Fratty Banker Douchebag. "Who’s your friend?”

Joan opens her mouth, wanting to scream at the guy to run. The last thing that anyone should want to be is in Moriarty’s crosshairs. “No one.” she says, her voice feeling suddenly hoarse.

“I was tryin’ to buy your friend a drink here, but she wasn’t having any of it." He looks down at himself and is evidentially pleased with what he sees if the wicked smirk that drifts across his lips is anything to go off of. "No idea why though.”

Moriarty gives him an apprising look that has Joan making a mental note to check the police reports for bodies in the morning. Her lip curls upwards into a sneer, and she looks murder at the man. “I might have a few, anyway, Joan, we must be going." She tugs on their joined arms, urging Joan to her feet and away from the bar and into the crush of people crowding the bar’s main floor.

Joan has the good sense to wait until they’re out of ear short before she hisses, low and urgent in Moriarty’s ear. "What the _hell_ are you doing?”

“Saving you from that exceptionally charming gentleman.” Moriarty glances over her shoulder, eyes flinty. “Bugger – He’s following us.”

“Fuck…" Joan breathes, feeling suddenly caught in a lie that she’s not entirely sure she agrees with.

Moriarty pauses, her hands resting on Joan’s shoulders, playing with the collar of her shirt. She’s in heels, but then again, so is Joan. They’re eye to eye and it’s unnerving, to look into those blue eyes and see nothing but concern and barely hidden affection. "Do you trust me?” she asks.

“Not even a little.”

“Good,” Moriarty leans closer, close enough that Joan can see her nostrils flaring and how dark her eyes are in the low light of this bar. It’s unnerving, she’s so close, and Joan definitely doesn’t want her any closer than she wants the asshole who won’t take the hint. At least Moriarty doesn’t smell like she drowned in Axe body spray. “Kiss me.”

And really, Joan should have known better. She’s not about to play that game with Moriarty, especially not with an audience. “No,” she breathes, and she can feel Moriarty’s breathy exhale on her lips.

“Smart,” Moriarty replies, her lips twisting into a horrifying smirk. Joan’s about to recoil when Moriarty slings an arm around her shoulder and turns to Fratty Banker Douchebag, who’s standing a few feet from them, looking like he’s just missed the greatest show on earth. “Did you miss the part where I said piss off?”

He falters, hands in his pockets. “No harm in being persistent,” he says with a shrug.

It is the strangest thing then, Moriarty taking a drink calmly from the large man in a suit that’s appeared behind them and throwing it in the guy’s face. Joan watches as he splutters, shaking off vodka and cranberry all over his very expensive-looking suit.

“That’ll stain,” Moriarty says airily, setting the empty glass down on a nearby table and taking Joan’s hand. “I recommend baking soda and peroxide,” she adds over her shoulder. “It works wonders on bloodstains as well.” The way she says it sounds off-handed, but the guy gives a violent shudder and Joan knows that all the evil that lurks behind Moriarty’s pretty exterior just seeped out at the edges and Fratty Banker Douchebag is well and truly terrified.

 _Good_ , she thinks, and lets Moriarty lead her from the bar.


	14. secret hand caresses (1k)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pyrotechnician asked: Joan x Moriarty Prompt: secret hand caresses

Joan isn’t a tactile person.

Her romantic partners have often complained about it. She doesn’t like to hold hands or really even touch other people in public. Joan blames it on growing up in this city, on becoming accustomed to cold shoulders and hostile attitudes. She blames it on her mother never really hugging, and on her father wanting to hug too much to make up for lost time when Joan has never really mastered the art of familiar affection.

What irritates her, sitting in Interview One across from probably her least favorite person in the world, is that she apparently doesn’t broadcast enough of a ‘don’t touch me’ vibe to fend off the worst sorts of people.

She’s trying to stomach this fact, and she’s trying to force off the horror of coming to understand that Moriarty keeps finding excuses to touch her.

The pass of a pen becomes Moriarty’s index finger touching her own for longer than is strictly necessary. A file flipped open has Moriarty leaning in far too close, touching Joan from shoulder to mid-thigh as Moriarty leans in close to consult a list of evidence.

It’s…

It’s distracting and Joan wants to her to stop. Or actually commit to it, because just as soon as one of these touches happen, the contact is snatched away. There’s a guilty, almost imperceptible downwards turn of Moriarty’s lips in those moments. Joan doesn’t understand that, it feels as though Moriarty is trying not to touch, but keeps doing it anyway.

Sherlock gets up and leaves to go and collect something from the printer, leaving Moriarty and Joan sitting across from each other. Moriarty’s wrists are locked in handcuffs that Joan knows won’t hold her, and she has a photograph in her hands.

They’ve brought her in knowing the risks. A kid is missing - again - and they’ve already ascertained that this one isn’t Moriarty’s as well. There is a connection to her, yes, but this situation isn’t like Kayden Fuller’s. There’s an urgency about this, the child has been taken by the head of a cartel rival to Morairty’s organization. They know that they’re helping her to remove competition, but finding the child takes priority.

Moriarty picks up a pen and twists it down, picking her way efficiently from her cuffs and setting them aside with a flourish that does very little to impress Joan. The scars on her wrists are red and angry, and Joan is sure that they’ll never fade completely. “That’s much better,” she says and Joan rolls her eyes.

“If Marcus comes back in, you’ll have to be quick about putting them on again,” she comments, her attention already back to the file she’s reading.

A humorless little laugh escapes Moriarty’s lips and she reaches over, her arm brushing against Joan’s, to pull a file over to herself. “Tell me something,” she says, straightening.

Joan looks up.

“Why do you flinch when I touch you?" She holds her hands open, scars on her wrists red and angry against her black blouse and grey sweater. They make Joan feel sick to her stomach, just thinking about all that had happened during that case and how a simple, 'this is my daughter, she’s in danger, I know where she is’ would have sufficed, instead of all of that violence and death. "I’ve never attempted to hurt you, Joan. Intimidate yes, but never hurt.”

Closing the file, Joan looks up. “You sliced a man’s throat with his own pen knife and held him in your lap as he bled out. You cut him so deeply that the medical examiner didn’t believe us when we showed him the knife you used. You shot three of your own men -”

“Two,” Moriarty corrects, her expression dark at the memory. “I had Mr. Peters shoot the third.”

“Whatever,” Joan says, her expression as closed off as she can possibly make it. To show any emotion here would be to tip her hand and she can’t do that, not if she wants to maintain the lead in this dance she’s halfway to being trapped in with Moriarty. “You had lost probably two pints of blood at that point. You shouldn’t have been able to do any of that without passing out.”

“My dear Watson,” Moriarty says, resting her chin on her hands. “I am rather accustomed to operating a pint or two short, Sherlock saw to that." And it is that casual way she says it that makes Joan remember how Sherlock had crumpled to his knees before this woman. How she had effortlessly destroyed such a brilliant and self-reliant man, and how it had all been a game for her. "But you haven’t answered my question.”

She doesn’t scowl, but it’s a close thing. “You’re a monster, and I don’t want you to touch me,” she says.

“If it was simply that,” Moriarty answers, and reaches out to touch Joan’s cheek. Joan tries, but can’t quite resist the urge to pull back. “You wouldn’t lean into the touch.”

Joan is caught in a lie and Moriarty’s eyes are victorious as she snatches her hand and the file that Joan had been reading back to her side of the table just in time for Sherlock’s return, map successfully printed out.

“Oh,” he says. “I was wondering why you hadn’t liberated yourself.”

“Watson was good enough to loan me a pen,” Moriarty replies smoothly, taking the map from him and picking up the pen. She traces a line, and then another, over the map, and pulls the file closer. They all bow their heads together as she plots out where their evidence has lead them, a building at the center of a six pointed star.

“He’ll be there,” Moriarty says, tapping the paper. “They’ve always liked symbolism more than they should.”

Joan wonders if she does too. 


	15. 5 conversations (647 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> c0rnflakeg1rl asked: I've seen these in your Fics but i'd love to see more: Joan and Jamie texting and/or chatting (bonus if Joan initiates one time during a very unexpected time and Jamie not being able to contain her surprise and glee)

Mon, Jan 20, 11:52 AM  
?: This murder is all wrong, and you’re following the wrong leads.  
You: I wasn’t aware I’d given you this number.  
?: You’d be surprised what you’ve given me.  
You: What’s wrong with the murder then?  
?: You’re the detective, Watson, you tell me.  
You: You’re the criminal who seems eager to help, maybe I should have you brought in for questioning.  
?: Now really, where’s the fun in that?

-  
  
Wed, Jan 22, 8:47 PM  
?: I told you it was all wrong.  
You: I don’t appreciate being stalked by a serial killer.  
?: Perhaps we have a fundamental disagreement on what the definition of a ‘serial killer’ is, Watson, because I assure you, I am not one.   
You: Fine, sociopath, whatever. You’re following me and I want you to stop.  
?: As you wish.

-  
  
Sat, Jan 25, 10:34 PM  
?: In the past 24 hours there have been exactly eleven homicides in the city, and yet you’re focused on one that happened nearly forty years ago. Why is this?  
?: I’ve kept my promise, Watson, before you say anything. You both were on the Channel Three news.  
You: The murder is connected to an old art theft at a gallery in the Lower East Side.  
?: That’s quite the famous unsolved case, Watson. Do you think you’ll solve it?  
You: That’s the plan.

-  
  
Mon, Jan 27, 11:15 AM  
You: If one were to need to acquire a lead-based paint that’s no longer in production to reproduce a painting from the mid-1700s, where would one go about looking for it?  
?: Nowhere in the city. There’s an antique shop in Bridgeport that usually has a decent selection, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Best to get a power set at an estate sale. Better color selection.  
?: Have you found it then?  
?: It probably is a forgery, such a piece would never resurface in the US. Sherlock has a very good eye for forgeries, ask him.  
You: You taught him how to spot them, didn’t you?  
?: I never needed to. He was always quite good at it on his own.   
You: Well, he doesn’t think it’s a fake, but I do. It just looks… off.  
?: Do you want me to come and have a look?

-  
  
Friday, Jan 31, 9:36 PM  
You: Sherlock won’t stop sulking FYI. This is all your fault.  
?: I wasn’t the one who dared second-guess his flawed hypothesis.  
You: No, you just swooped in and got him all twisted up in your horrible games the way you always do.  
?: He has you to untangle him, Watson. He will be fine once his ego recovers from the blow we’ve dealt it.  
?: I wonder, how do you feel, knowing you saw something that the great Sherlock Holmes did not.  
You: I feel perfectly normal. Sherlock and I have different theories to many cases, it’s called having a good rapport.  
?: Be that as it may, he was rather put out, wasn’t he?  
You: Oh, you have no idea.  
?: Have you studied art? One doesn’t simply pick out a forgery as you did without some knowledge of the subject.  
You: Not really. My mom likes it. I used to go to MoMa and the Met with her when I was a kid.  
?: And now?  
?: Would you study it now if you had the chance?  
You: Maybe.   
You: I’ve never had much of a chance to actually go to a museum and just appreciate what I like.  
?: You should go. Sherlock’s in a sulk, and who knows? You might learn something.  
You: And if I went would you turn up?  
?: Maybe. That’s the fun of it, Watson. Living a little.  
You: You could, you know, just set a time. I’d consider going.  
?: Very well, Tomorrow, Ten. I’ll collect you.  
?: Oh and Joan? Happy New Year.

Joan Watson stares at her phone for a moment, before thumbing through her contacts, and calling her mother.


	16. Maths (1400 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Joan/Moriarty; studying abroad in college AU
> 
> (lightly edited as I've actually lived in england now)

Joan sort of, well, cheeses it studying abroad her junior year. She goes to England, London more specifically. Her mother had wanted her to go to Hong Kong, but Joan’s done with doing what her mother wants her to do. Besides, she already speaks that language and this program at Imperial had actually seemed interesting. Plus, maybe she doesn’t want to learn a third language on top of the two she already knows. 

She arrives in the middle of a late summer rainstorm, just turned twenty-one and eyes staring upwards at the sky and ruing the day she’d made this decision. It had been eighty five degrees and sunny in New York, some six hours ago. Now it’s hot and raining and ugh – she doesn’t like being _wet_.

She buys an umbrella at a Sainsbury's just around the corner for her student housing and ventures out into the city.

Over her time in London, and she’s only doing a semester because she honestly _cannot_ allot more time than that to something so completely and utterly not her major as studying abroad, Joan wanders the city. She hasn’t really made the friends here that she usually makes, and honestly sometimes the ways that some of the guys look at her makes her a little uncomfortable. So much so that she’d rather wander a strange city at night than spend time with them.

She tells her mom on the student apartment phone, dialing out hours and hours of prepaid international phone cards, that she’s not entirely sure why she decided that leaving the county was a good idea. She wants to go home, she wants her mom. She even wants Oren, annoying little shit that he is.

It’s on one of these wanderings that she happens by what is not a high school, but rather a ‘college’ whatever the hell that means. Joan’s still not really sure she understands the British education system. This place looks really nice though, and she spends a minute staring up at the high arches of the chapel on the school’s campus. She’s learned to appreciate the brief instances of beauty in the vast grey of the city, growing up in New York. 

She’s just turned to leave, when she hears someone behind her. She turns, glancing over her shoulder, the epaulets on her jean jacket digging into her cheek. There’s a student standing under one of the arching gateways, stubbing out a cigarette with the toe of her shoe. Joan blinks, wondering if they’re even allowed to smoke on campus. She figures that they’re probably not, and shoves her hands into her jacket pockets, intent on leaving. 

“It isn’t often that we get visitors here,” the girl says, flipping her blonde hair over her shoulder and tugging at her sweater collar and smoothing her skirt flat before she steps forward. “I could report you, for being a pervert _._ ”

Joan laughs at that, her boots digging into the soft earth underfoot. “Really? Aren’t the guys usually the creeps?”

The girl’s face lights up then, she’s got a smile like nothing Joan’s ever seen before. It’s like she knows something, a deep dark secret that she’s keeping just to herself. “You’re _American.”_

“I am,” Joan says, because this girl can’t be more than fifteen or so and fuck, does that make her feel old as hell. 

The girl’s practically vibrating in her school uniform, she’s so excited. “I’m Jamie,” she says, holding out her hand. Joan takes it because she’s polite and this kid seems genuinely friendly, unlike a lot of people she’s met here. There is paint all over the girl’s hands, and her shoes, now that Joan’s got a better look at them.

“Joan,” Joan says in reply. She says that she goes to the university up the road and asks Jamie why she’s out smoking instead of going to class. Jamie laughs and says that she’s cutting.

It’s strange, as they find themselves, some twenty minutes later, sitting in a pub. Joan’s bought Jamie a beer and she doesn’t even feel bad about it. “I’m sixteen,” Jamie specifies when the barkeep eyes her suspiciously. “Do you want my ID?”

“You’re all covered in paint,” Joan says then, as Jamie doesn’t drink her beer at all and instead turns her back to the bar where they’re sitting. She surveys it like it’s her kingdom, paint splattered arms resting on the bar behind her, eyes half closed and impassive. “Do you paint?”

“Not really,” Jamie shrugs. “I do it as something extra, something to take my mind off of things. Mostly I just do maths.”

Joan raises her beer to that, because she’s taking two math classes herself. 

What develops in the ensuing three months of her time in London is something of a friendship. Jamie goes to class most of the time; actually, she’s not one of the ‘delinquents’ that Joan sometimes reads about in the papers. Honestly, she’s absurdly good at math. She’s been helping Joan with some of the finer points of her calculus and advanced statistics classes that she’s taking simply to avoid taking them back in the states where the professors will (undoubtedly) go far too fast for Joan’s usual pace when it comes to math. No, coming here has actually made it so that Joan can take all the classes that would have slowed her down back home.

“How did you get so good with numbers?” Joan asks one day when they’re sitting in the library. Jamie’s working on a proof of some seemingly impossible equation that her teacher’s set her as extra work, and Joan’s just doing basic calculus. They’re shoulder to shoulder and Joan cannot help herself. This girl, and she’s just that, a girl, has been a better friend to her in the past three months than some of the people she’d met the first day she’d arrived. 

“They come naturally to me,” Jamie explains, setting down her pencil and running a hand through her hair. “I like the order of them. They’re predictable, you know?”

It’s in moments like this, of Jamie’s frank honesty, that Joan wonders if it’s weird for them to be friends, to be hanging out like this. To be doing fucking math together like it’s some sort of bonding experience. She’s just grateful that she’s been able to make a friend here. Her mother’s glad too, Oren just says that of _course_ she makes friend with some sort of math nerd prodigy. 

Joan leans against Jamie’s shoulder and watches as she moves variables around like it’s actually easy and not complicated as all get out. They share a smile, and Joan cannot help herself sometimes around Jamie. She lets their fingers tangle together, because she can tell that Jamie is starved for human contact. Jamie shrugs off Joan’s questions about her family, saying that she doesn’t much care for them. They’ve stuck her on boarding school after all. 

After that revelation, Joan lets Jamie hug her, lets their bodies touch when Jamie’s far too young for this sort of thing, and she feels like a dirty old man when she finds herself looking longer than she should. She knows that Jamie’s attracted to her, at least on some level. Her blushes and the way that she lingers when she should not are enough to clue Joan in. It’s the nineties, Joan reasons, and she’s willing to indulge Jamie’s need to experiment. 

On her last night in London, a rainy December evening, Joan lets Jamie kiss her at the back of a pub and promises to write.

She never does.

*

(The next time she sees Jamie Moriarty she’s holding a paint brush and looks terrified out of her mind and Joan’s just barely managed to catch Sherlock as he’s pitched forward and all but collapsed onto his knees. She supports him and feels all the blood drain from her face, staring at the image of that girl – now a woman, now _the_ woman. She doesn’t say anything at all until later, a moment alone when she’s supposed to be giving Jamie clothes.

“You broke him,” she says, the anger rising underneath the thin veneer of calm she’s barely holding together.

Jamie Moriarty turns then, the same wicked smile that Joan remembers from her youth playing at her lips. “I never thought I’d find _you_ again. You’re an added bonus, Joan Watson. One I’ve sorely missed.”)


	17. Cosmic Jokes (1600 words)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jessmiriamdrew asked: Joan/Jamie, trapped in a room

Joan is pretty sure that her life is some sort of a cosmic joke. There have been moments, across the span of her memory, that have driven this point home rather exceptionally, but none seem to be more damning than this one.

The reason being, naturally, that this is the one where she’s gotten herself trapped in a room with no doors and no windows.

As a child, Joan liked to climb things. She’d climb the jungle gyms at the park and walk, two hands outstretched like she was in the circus, across the beam where the swings were suspended.

“Come down, Joanie,” Oren would shout up at her, and Joan would just laugh and jump from the bars, landing in a cloud of dust and scraped knees and child-like laughter. 

Her mother hated it, shouting at her in two languages that she was going to fall, that she was going to break her neck. 

Joan never fell. Watsons, her father had once told her, always land on their feet.

“Well,” comes the voice of the other occupant of the window and door-less room. “I can assure this is not how I’d envisioned spending my Tuesday.”

Oh right, that other reason why Joan’s life is a cosmic joke? She’s gone and got herself trapped in a room with Moriarty.

Joan looks over her shoulder, scowling. “I wasn’t aware that incarcerated criminals had much in the way of control over their lives.” It isn’t her best work, not even particularly scathing. Moriarty’s been called in to consult on their case, as she apparently did a great deal of business with their victim, a noted art dealer and smuggler of antiquities through one of the many high-end auction houses that call New York home. 

Moriarty leans back against the wall, one hand held up in almost casual disregard to Joan’s remark. “The routine does get rather dull, I’ll admit.” She waves her hand almost dismissively, “Which is why I volunteered my services to consult on this case.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a close thing. The surge of annoyance that wells up within her when she hears Moriarty speak of her ‘consulting’ like it’s anything akin to what Joan and Sherlock do is enough to make her see red at the best of times. Now though, caught alone with Moriarty, it just seems ill-advised. She sucks in a deep, steadying breath.

“Well, you’ve traded one prison for another,” Joan replies, and she keeps her voice even. 

“Yes, but here I have you, Joan,” Moriarty face is split by a genuine smile that catches Joan off guard and makes her stare, struck by how a simple expression could change the entire character of the woman. “That makes a world of difference.”

The case has had so many twists and turns that Joan has to admit that she was privately almost glad when Agent Matoo showed up with Moriarty in tow. Sherlock had been at the end of his rope and the case was quickly growing cold. With Moriarty had come a new list of suspects and underworld informants, as well as some interesting pieces of blackmail that Moriarty seemed willing to divulge.

They’d found this place quite by accident, Joan trailing half a step behind Moriarty as they explored the victim’s estate. He supposedly was holding a large quantity of gold bars for a client, and that was the suspected reason for his death. No one knew where the gold was, and after ten minutes alone in the room where the body’d been found, Sherlock had found two secret passageways and a hidden compartment in the desk.

So, in the realm of all things cosmic joke related: Moriarty pulling down on a candlestick and stepping behind a sliding panel that opened in a wall and Joan following her, really wasn’t that farfetched. No, it was far more normal than Joan thought it had any business being.

“What do you think this room was used for?” Joan asks, running her fingers along the perfectly sealed space where the sliding panel in the wall should have been. 

“Panic room,” Moriarty supposes. She points to a series of nearly imperceptible lines in the wall. “Those are steel bars, meant to reinforce the structure.”

Joan nods, already concentrating on getting out of the room. “So there should be a way to open the door again, right?”

“One would think that you’re desperate to get away from me, Joan,” Moriarty is still smiling at her and its still off-putting and Joan cannot help that it makes the hairs at the back of her neck stand up. 

“Could be,” Joan replies, not giving voice to the feeling of yeah, being trapped in a room with a person that Joan knows is responsible for the brutal maiming of a former employee is really not on her list of how she wants to spend her Tuesday. This is Moriarty fully healed, with fresh scars on each wrist too. She hates to think how dangerous the woman could be not half-passed out due to blood loss. 

They lapse into silence, Joan searching around the room in one direction, Moriarty wordlessly going the other. They meet in the middle, eye to eye and Joan feels a well of panic rise within her. Moriarty hasn’t found anything either. 

“Do you have your cell phone on you?” Moriarty asks, her voice deathly calm. 

Joan reaches down into her jacket pocket and touches nothing but a receipt for coffee from earlier. She’d left it in her purse. In the car. “Damn,” she says, pulling her hands out of her pockets, empty save the receipt. “I think I left it in my purse. It’s out in the—”

“Squad car, I know,” Moriarty replies. She leans back against the wall and slides down it, feet in leather boots stretched out before her. Joan watches as she seems to gather herself for a moment before gesturing to the spot beside her. “Might as well get comfortable, Watson. Since you are without your cell phone, there’s a good chance that we’ll be waiting a while until someone comes looking for us.”

She’s right too, and Joan hates it. Sherlock will probably assume, given the number of secret passageways that they’ve already discovered in this house, that they’ve gotten stuck somewhere. A panic room probably isn’t out of the question, really. The man was an eccentric.

Sitting down next to Moriarty takes a lot more courage than Joan had initially thought, and the slide of the wall against her back is solid and comforting, even if it’s trapping them at the same time. 

Joan’s boots are black and Moriarty’s are brown. They knock together, and Joan feels almost self-conscious as her leg brushes against Moriarty’s. They’re shoulder to shoulder, heads tilted back against the pure white walls of the room. “Remind me never to follow you anywhere ever again,” Joan says after a few minutes of staring up at the ceiling.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Moriarty asks. She’s not looking at Joan, no, her attention seems to still be focused on the ceiling. 

Turning, Joan sees a smirk playing at Moriarty’s lips. “I’m not a game.”

There’s a pause then, a beat where they don’t say anything at all. Joan wonders what Moriarty’s thinking, if she’s trying to work out how to tell Joan how much of a game she is. She hopes not, because Joan’s already having kind of a bad day and she doesn’t think she can be held accountable for her actions, should Moriarty’s games come into this conversation. 

“No,” Moriarty says at last, turning to look at Joan. Her face is completely blank, the mask she wore so effectively while pretending to be someone else entirely. Joan hates that she recognizes it and hates even more that it’s being used on her. "You’re far more than a game.“

And despite the circumstances, Joan cannot help feel the gentle burn of flattery rise up and crest, warm across her cheeks. 

There are a million questions, in this moment, that Joan thinks she could ask. Moriarty is in a giving mood; Joan might actually get a straight answer out of her. She opens her mouth to speak, her lips moving around the first word of the question, when Moriarty’s hand shoots out, touching her leg in warning.

Joan blinks, but then she hears it, the tell-tale scrape of the door being pulled open once again.

"Some questions are better left unasked,” Moriarty says, getting to her feet and offering Joan a hand. Joan takes it and feels how warm Moriarty is. There’s a flush at her cheeks and something new dancing behind her eyes.

Joan knows that look, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want Moriarty looking at her that way. The giant painting of her face (see reason # 354 why Joan Watson’s life continues to be a cosmic joke) had been enough to prove that point all too well. 

The door scrapes open and Sherlock’s standing there, one hand on the wall. He sees them, Joan pulling her hand away from Moriarty and Moriarty grinning that obnoxious, shit-eating grin that she totally favors when she gets her way. 

“Watson,” Sherlock announces, loudly enough for the entire world to hear. “I’m surprised at you. I can think of at least ten things I’d do, rather than hold hands with _her_ , while trapped in a room with no doors or windows.”

Joan marches past him, not looking back. She doesn’t see Moriarty lean up and whisper for a long time in Sherlock’s ear, and she certainly doesn’t see his face turn an unnatural shade of purple. She does notice, coming back with her phone successfully in her pocket, that he keeps giving her these odd looks and makes more than one reference to what Joan suspects are Sapphic poems. 

Moriarty, naturally, simply looks inordinately pleased with herself about the whole thing.

And Joan’s life? Totally a cosmic joke.


	18. a lot of harry potter crossover stuff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some hp elementary headcanons
> 
> Note: JKR is a trash human transphobe, these were written in late 2013 and early 2014, before her inevitable descent into TERF-dom. I do not approve of or wish to support her, but these were fun. She doesn't own the version of her books in our heads, but oh hell does she work hard to poison that version.

year one

Joan’s wand has a unicorn hair core, and is made of oak. Mr. Ollivander looks down his pince-nez at her and tells her that it’s a good, stable wand. “For steady people, Ms. Watson,” he explains. “And the unicorn hair means that you’re pure of heart." He nods approvingly at Joan’s mother and Oren, who’s poking through the discarded wands with a dejected look on his face. Joan has made red, purple and green sparks in the past half-hour. Oren hasn’t even been able to coax a reaction out of any of the wands.

She can see the drawn, worried look on her mother’s face as she hands over ten galleons and seven sickles to Mr. Ollivander, and Joan tries to make her feel proud. She makes more sparks appear, these are white and soon Mr. Ollivander is laughing, his head thrown back as he takes the wand gently from her hands and wraps it carefully up in a box tied with simple brown ribbon.

"You have talent, Ms. Watson,” he says as they leave. “I wonder what you’ll do with it.”

-

The war is over, and people aren’t afraid. At least they aren’t afraid of You-Know-Who and people like him. Not right now.

“We thought about sending you to Beauxbatons,” Her mother tells her at King’s Cross station. “Because of the -” she sniffs and looks down her nose at a red-haired woman with a gaggle of red-headed children around her, a little girl in her arms. “ _climate_ ,” she settles on. “You will make us proud, won’t you Joan?”

“Yes _Ma_ ,” Joan says automatically, clinging to the handles of the trolley that they’ve loaded her trunk onto.

Oren looks at her with longing and Joan wants to tell him that it will be okay - but she doesn’t think it ever will be.

-

She meets a boy named Marcus Bell on the train. He plays Exploding Snap with her and Joan shares her lunch with him. They buy Pumpkin Pasties from the old lady that comes down the train with a cart full of treats.

“I think my brother would love this,” Marcus offers, a tentative, shy smile on his face. “But Ms. McGonagall - she’s… I think a teacher at Hogwarts… she told my mum that I was the only one in the family that had any magical talent. I guess it explains why weird stuff kept happening to me, right?”

He says it like he thinks Joan’s another person like him, and she wonders how he knows what she’s hiding. Her mother has told her to guard the secret of her grandfather’s muggle heritage closely. They are wizards, they are safe, they won’t be rounded up by Death Eaters and You-Know-Who’s supporters. They’re different enough as it is.

Joan tries not to think about the unopened owls from Azkaban, the pained look on her mother’s face as she casts _incendio_ wordlessly, burning them to ash and reminding Joan and Oren in her native language that that man is not their father. Not anymore.

“My grandfather was muggle-born,” Joan offers with a small smile.

_And I think my brother might be a squib._

-

When she writes to them to tell them the outcome of her sorting, her parents’ response is about what she expects. Hufflepuff is a good house, her mother writes back. Her step-father doesn’t write anything at all. They were both in Ravenclaw and Joan feels like a failure for not getting in. The Sorting Hat had said she had the mind for Ravenclaw, but her logic was, it said, far more emphatic than coldly analytical. “You’ll be happier there,” it points out. “You’ll have true friends there.”

Marcus, the boy she met on the train, moves over to make room for her at the table. An older girl with bright purple hair that clashes violently with her yellow-and-black tie leans across the table and smiles brightly at her.

“Don’t worry,” she says, following Joan’s rueful gaze over to the Ravenclaw table. “Not everyone gets into the house their parents wanted for them.”

-

Sherlock Holmes, a first-year Ravenclaw, lands Joan into her first-ever detention with Professor Snape three weeks into term and Joan is enraged by the whole thing.

He’s this tiny thing, Joan’s taller than him, and he’s too smart. It’s unnerving how smart he is. Joan tries to match wits with him in Potions class and Professor Snape puts them both into detention after they blow up their cauldron and workbench.

“You two deserve each other,” he practically growls from behind his desk as he watches them scrub out cauldrons, covered head to toe in suds from Mrs. Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover. They’ve been whispering insults at each other, when they think he won’t hear them. He obviously does, and Joan feels like crumbling under his black-eyed stare. “You will be partners for as long as you share my class.”

-

Tonks encourages Joan and Marcus to make friends outside of their house - but most of the time, Joan hides in the library and tries Sherlock Holmes and his mocking tone and the irritating fact that he knows everything.

“You should be more out-going,” her mother tells her in a letter. “No one ends up first in their year without having friends, Joan.”

-

Their first flying lesson is at the end of October, as the weather turns bitterly cold. Madam Hooch teaches them warming charms and Joan isn’t very good at them at first. She stands in bare feet out in the courtyard outside of the Hufflepuff common room and practices the night before the first outdoor lesson and does the charm over and over until she can do it better than Marcus, who’s ace at charms.

Joan has flown before. Marcus hasn’t, and yet he takes to it like she doesn’t. Her boom flies away with her on it and Sherlock Holmes kicks his broom into action and comes to rescue her with a truly impressive bit of flying. Madam Hooch, at least, doesn’t seem too angry when they land. Joan has her arms wrapped around Sherlock’s neck and she doesn’t let go for a long time.

“You’re an arse,” she informs him later, over dinner when he ends up sitting next to her and Marcus. “But you’re okay.”

He bows his head judiciously. “Thanks…” he says. “I think.”

-

In February, after Joan goes home for the Christmas hols and Sherlock does not, he asks her about her father.

“He writes for _Transfiguration Quarterly_ , why?” Joan says, moving her rook by prodding it with her wand, eyeing Sherlock’s next move with narrowed eyes. He thinks he’s running the Queen’s Gambit, but he’s about to mess it up and Joan’s going to win.

Sherlock looks down at his hands, up to Joan, back down again. “He’s not your real father. For one, he’s white." He narrows his eyes, staring hard at Joan. "For another, you and your brother look nothing like him.”

Joan doesn’t speak again, her throat feeling like it’s closing up, choking on the truth.

He sits back, contemplating how Joan’s about to win the match. “My father got out of the trials,” he says at length, fiddling with a pawn, changing his strategy mid-game. “Said it was Imperius." 

Joan hedges a bet and takes his other rook. "Was it?”

“No.”

-

Snape, Joan is pretty sure, regrets making them partners when, right before term ends, they get involved in a complicated project with Mark Hudson, the sixth-year Ravenclaw prefect who’s currently struggling with something that Sherlock seems to understand but Joan has no words for.

“We are first years,” she points out, shoving potions ingredients down the front of her robes. They’re standing in the middle of Snape’s private store, and Joan’s got one eye trained on the door. “We can’t make a potion like that. I doubt even _Snape_ could do a potion like that.”

Sherlock boggles at her. “Snape is one of the best potions masters in Wizarding Britain, if not all of Wizarding Europe.” He says, checking off another item on the list. “He could do it in his sleep.”

She won’t admit it to Sherlock, but she’s pretty sure that Sherlock’s half in love with the great greasy bat.

So when Snape catches them and Joan spills the beans because she doesn’t want Hufflepuff to lose their already tenuous hold on second in total points for the year, she’s a bit surprised when Mark Hudson is hauled in to Snape’s gross office and the four of them brew the potion together.

“The effects are irreversible, have you discussed this with your family?" Snape asks when it’s done and held under a stasis charm that Sherlock casts and maybe earns Ravenclaw five points. "This is not a decision to be taken lightly.”

“I know,” Mark Hudson says. “And they’re dead anyway. Killed in the war." He says, and that’s all the explanation Snape seems to need.

Joan wonders if Snape was the one who did the killing. She and Sherlock both know, in their own ways, exactly what is burned onto the arm of their teacher.

Sherlock grabs her hand and they back away as he downs the potion.

"Some people just don’t fit, Watson. Magic is a wonderful thing - it makes such things easily correctable.”

Joan doesn’t ask him if he doesn’t fit as well.

(Snape takes twenty points each and puts them in detention until the end of term. It somehow feels like they’ve done a good thing. Sherlock tells her on the last day of exams that Snape’s published a paper on tweaks he’s made to the gender-reassignment potion they brewed.

“That utterly self-serving _git_.”

“Well, he is a Slytherin.”)

*

year two

Sherlock gets a pet turtle over the summer hols (“A tortoise, Watson, I’ll thank you to not miss-identify my familiar.”) and writes Joan endlessly about how he’s convinced that Clyde, the tortoise, is actually any number of magical creatures like minogame that he’s looked up in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Joan, for her part, writes back that he’s far too young to be wanting to trek through the Galapagos Islands or the Amazon to determine the origin of his tortoise.

Her mother tells her stories of the importance of the turtle in China when Joan asks her about them, and then tells of the muggle gods of India, and of the world turtle. Joan relays the stories to Sherlock and very carefully never mentions who it is that she seems to spend half of her days writing to. Her mother, she doesn’t think, would approve of her being friends with Sherlock Holmes, even if he is in Ravenclaw.

Some wounds, after all, are never forgotten.

-

Oren does not receive a Hogwarts letter. August first comes and passes and sees him sitting on the front steps of their house, staring up at the sky, chin resting in his palms and elbows on his knees. She sits with him for a little while, her leg pressing against his and a million words at the tip of her tongue.

Her mother is looking at muggle secondary schools and Joan feels sick to her stomach.

“Are you going to get him tested?” Her stepfather asks one night after Joan is supposed to be in bed.

“I will,” Her mother promises in a sad voice. “I just want to wait a little longer.”

-

Sherlock’s father is a tall, imposing man. Joan bumps into him with her trunk-laden trolley quite by mistake and is mumbling an apology when Sherlock jumps out from behind the man, a small box tucked under one arm. “Watson!” he says excitedly, as though he’s actually missed her.

“Sherlock!” She says because well, she has missed him. “Is that your turtle?”

“Tortoise,” he corrects with pained look.

Joan sticks her tongue out at him and bends to get a good look through the slats of the little wooden cage. “Oh Sherlock, he’s so cute!”

Sherlock, because he is twelve, makes a face.

Joan pretends that she doesn’t see her mother tense beside her, or see Oren try and pull his hand away from where her white-knuckled grip is crushing his hand.

-

They see Tonks on the train, and she sticks her head into their compartment for a few minutes, saying hello to Marcus and Joan and wiggling her eyebrows at Sherlock for a moment before making them grow long and grey like Professor Dumbledore’s. He scowls at her and she gives a little wave before disappearing off up the train.

“It’s not far that she can do that,” Sherlock grumbles, fiddling with Clyde’s cage.

“I think it’s wicked,” Marcus says.

“Metamorphmagi are extremely rare,” Sherlock says, sniffing and looking disturbingly like Joan’s mother. “It’s a shame that it’s wasted on her. You know what her mother did?”

Joan’s back stiffens and she can almost hear the moment when Sherlock’s brain catches up with his voice. Marcus has no idea what he’s about to say, about how cruel it is.

But Sherlock snaps his mouth shut and pouts and it isn’t until Marcus runs off after the food trolley for a chocolate frog that Joan rounds on Sherlock.

“You were going to call her mother a blood traitor, weren’t you?” She demands, jabbing a finger into his chest.

He looks at her for a long time. “The Blacks are all bad, even if they marry muggles." He shakes his head. "Her aunt is a mass-murderer, her second cousin killed a man in cold blood - blasted him to bits-”

There’s a knock on the door and a red-headed boy with glasses sticks his head into the compartment. “Sorry,” he says when they turn to stare at him. “Have you seen a rat?”

They haven’t.

The boy sighs, straightens up. “Well, if you see him, can you tell Bill Weasley - the prefect - that you’ve got him? Mum’d never forgive me if I lost Scabbers before I even got to school.”

They promise to do so, and the boy vanishes once more, leaving Sherlock and Joan in stony silence.

-

Joan doesn’t talk to Sherlock for nearly two weeks, until they’re shoved next to each other in Herbology and told to share a tray of Mandrakes. She’s mad at him, for what he’s said about Tonks, and for being so blinded by his father’s prejudice that he can’t look past it to see how excellent a person Tonks is. 

“Martha Hudson is teaching me ancient runes,” Sherlock announces as though they’ve just parted for a few hours, rather than a few weeks. Martha Hudson is also head girl, and Joan can see that she’s flourishing - and not trapped by the melancholy of her circumstances anymore. Professor Snape, horrible bastard that he is, had done a good thing for her. “She’s offered to teach you as well.”

“Sherlock,” Joan says in a low voice as Professor Sprout starts to explain about the reading and how Mandrakes need to be handled with extreme care. “Why would you learn something that you’re just going to take again next year anyway?”

He shrugs, “I spoke to Professor Syfer, he says that if I can past the third year exam at the end of this year that I’d be allowed into the fourth year class.”

Joan rolls her eyes and pulls on her charmed earmuffs. Only Sherlock would be able to get away with something like that.

-

It’s Tonks, eventually, who mends the fence between Joan and Sherlock. She catches them sitting across from each other at the Hufflepuff table not long before Halloween, very pointedly _not_ talking to each other. “You lot need to stop fighting.”

Joan’s heart feels like it’s thudding in her chest and her mouth feels like sandpaper. They’re fighting over an insult to Tonks, Joan can’t very well come out and say that. Tonks wouldn’t understand. She’s too caring, too nice. A true Hufflepuff. 

“I won’t until _he_ admits that he was rude and wrong,” Joan says, glaring at Sherlock. 

Tonks rolls her eyes. “You are too young to be feuding like this while obviously still being friends.” She throws up her hands when Joan sticks her tongue out at Sherlock. It’s his birthday soon, and Joan’s bought him a present even though she knows better than to give it to him while they’re fighting. “Even Martha Hudson is worried about you.”

“Martha is teaching him ancient runes.” Joan sucks her lower lip into her mouth and chews thoughtfully on it. “And I want to learn them too.”

“You’ll just be taking them next year, won’t you?”

“Sherlock says that Professor Sypher will let him into the fourth year class if he passes the third year final.”

Sherlock has been oddly silent through this, but he looks up then, eyes wide and full of something that Joan knows no word for. He regards Tonks solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he says. Joan’s eyes widen. She’d never thought.

Tonks laughs. “Whatever it was you did, I forgive you.”

It gets easier after that.

(Marcus still thinks Joan should be mad at him, and that’s a feud that doesn’t get resolved until almost the end of second year.)

-

Joan doesn’t go home that year at Christmas. Her mother and stepfather have gone to China to see a specialist about Oren’s apparent lack of magical ability and Joan already knows what they’re going to say. She hates it, hates it so much that she ends up sobbing into Sherlock’s shoulder up in the owlry on Christmas Eve, the letter from her mother fallen to the dropping covered floor. Oren is a squib, the letter says. He will never come to Hogwarts; they’ve enrolled him in a muggle secondary school.

“It’s not your fault,” Sherlock says, holding her as tightly as he can. “You’re not his mother and you’re not his father.”

“I took it all,” Joan wails. “I stole all the magic in the family.”

“Now you’re just being hysterical.”

“I hate you.” Joan pushes her fists into Sherlock’s shoulders and cries harder. He doesn’t let her go, holding on to her and grounding her, refusing to be pushed away. In a way, Joan is grateful. 

-

A letter comes in February from a sodden, battered-looking owl. It drops it right into Sherlock’s oatmeal despite it being for Joan. Joan fishes it out and lefts Tonks lean over and cast a cleaning charm on it. (“Mum says I’m rubbish at ‘em, but I think I can manage getting oatmeal off of a letter.”) Joan makes a note to try and get her mother to teach her some basic household charms over the holidays.

“Who’s it from?” Sherlock asks.

Joan’s expression goes dark after she sees the handwriting. She calmly sets it on an empty serving tray and pokes it with her wand. “My father,” she says, watching the smoke and ash curl around the corners of the parchment. 

“Oh.” He doesn’t say anything for a long time after that.

-

“You know you can tell me things, right?” Sherlock says when they’re out running practice loops on their booms under strong heating charms one blustery day in early April. “I know what it’s like to have family secrets.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Sherlock. It’s in the past.” Joan never wants to talk about her father, or about all the things that he’s done and continues to do to her family despite the fact that he’s locked away in Azkaban and will hopefully remain there until the end of his life. She doesn’t want to talk about how sometimes she wishes he would have died during the war, because if he were dead, at least, her mother would never have to open those letters.

Her stepfather is a lot like Sherlock and wants to _talk_ about the scars that that man left of their collective souls constantly. Joan simply doesn’t want to. She figures that she’s old enough now to say no to people. 

Sherlock never pushes, and Joan’s forever grateful. He instead announces that he’s thinking about trying out for the Ravenclaw quidditch team next year as they’re going to be short a beater. 

“That’s just what you need,” Joan announces, beginning to practice the reversing drill that they’ve been set. “Getting hit in the head with a bludger on a semi-regular basis.”

He bats his eyelashes at her and flies in a lazy loop above her head. “Someone’s got to make sure that they don’t hit anyone else.”

“You’re _mental._ ”

-

Professor Snape assigns what Joan is certain is supposed to be a terribly hard project for the last project of the year, but Sherlock throws himself into it with such vigor and gusto that Joan isn’t particularly shocked to find out that not only is he _researching_ the magical properties of bees, but he’s thinking about starting a hive somewhere on school grounds.

“There are so many different species of magical bee,” Sherlock says to their dour and probably very evil potions professor in his office one evening not long before the project is due. “I had a hard time choosing just one.”

“I trust you took care of that for him, Ms. Watson?” Snape asks, not looking up from where his long nose is buried somewhere in his grading. “I will not tolerate another directionless meander through the chaotic mind of Sherlock Holmes. You will share the grade.”

“I know sir,” Joan says quickly. She’s talked Sherlock down to only three types of magical honey and the properties of various stingers, but he’d wanted to _cultivate_ some bees to see if fresh versus dried ingredients changed the properties at all and they were only second years. She’d told Sherlock if they did that, a NEWT-level project, that Snape would probably give them both Trolls and detention for the remainder of the term.

-

(It is a little directionless, but they earn an Exceeds Expectations on the project, a rare good grade from Professor Snape. He is as curious about the properties of magical honey as Sherlock is, apparently, and mentions in his notes that there are many practical uses that their project didn’t go into at all. Joan’s just grateful for the grade, but Sherlock takes that as an opportunity to start researching how to get _magical bees_ and if they’ll survive a Scottish winter.

Joan prays to whatever old gods might be listening that she doesn’t come back next term to an apiary set up in the Ravenclaw third year boys dormitory. Because that would be awful.

“If I find bees anywhere near me I will hex you, Sherlock Holmes,” Marcus calls across to the Ravenclaw table during the end-of-term-feast. It’s the first time he’s spoken to either of them in _months_ and it sounds weird but good.

Sherlock makes a rude gesture and Marcus glares at him. 

“I make no promises.”)

*

(a time skip)

*

year six

Oren spends the summer studying for his GCSEs while Joan anxiously goes over her NEWT-level potions text and hopes to god that she managed to achieve an ‘Outstanding’ on her OWL so that she can continue the class. Professor Snape is notoriously strict about these things and while Joan thinks that he doesn’t really mind her, there’s a definite sense of worry that she cannot shake as July starts to wane.

Sherlock, naturally, has attempted to use his father’s connections to get his hands on his results early. He’s written Joan to inform her that apparently no one appreciates the son of a former Death Eater demanding his exam results early. He then goes on to say that his father attempted to force him to 'get all chummy’ with Lucius Malfoy’s son before the school year starts.

’ _As I am not a Slytherin, I fail to see the purpose of befriending an eleven-year-old who will most assuredly be sent straight to the dungeons upon encountering the Sorting Hat_ ,’ Sherlock had concluded. ’ _However, his presence does remind me of something else: Harry Potter is Draco Malfoy’s age, and will be starting at Hogwarts this year._ ’

Joan hadn’t thought about that, but she pities the child even now. She cannot imagine what it must be like, growing up with a name like that. She tucks Sherlock’s letter away and heads inside, the results would surely come soon.

-

Joan gets an O in Potions and writes Martha Hudson to tell her the good news. Martha writes back in fluid cursive and Joan smiles as she reads the letter until she’s interrupted by Sherlock floo'ing in and demanding to see her results.

“Why are you even here?” Joan asks, because they’re not supposed to floo to each other’s houses. Joan’s mother doesn’t particularly approve of her friendship with Sherlock and Sherlock doesn’t 'like being glared at’. They avoid each other like the plague. “Don’t you have a summer position?”

Sherlock’s been working for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as an apprentice investigator over the summer. Mad-Eye Moody apparently thought it was a great idea, probably considering who his father is, and Sherlock’s been working with an inspector, Tommy Gregson, and his partner, a freshly minted auror named Kingsley Shacklebolt.

“I’ve a late start,” he says, plucking her exam results from her hand and reading them with a critical eye.

“You should have done better in Astronomy and Transfiguration,” he says, eyeing Joan’s two 'E’ in those classes with a thoughtful expression on his face. “I got a ’D’ in Muggle Studies though.”

“A Dreadful? Really?" Joan raises her eyebrows. "Did… you not study at all?" She can’t recall him not studying for that exam. In fact, she’s pretty sure that she helped to quiz him on some of the more obscure pieces of muggle technology that he was meant to identify for the exam.

"No, I aced the theory but failed the practical. We had to use a telephone to call a train station and book a ticket and I messed up the muggle money so badly that they thought I was attempting to rob the station.”

Joan snickers.

“It isn’t funny, Watson!" Sherlock protests, waving his arms around.

"It is a little funny,” Joan says between giggles. “That you were apparently going to rob a muggle train station over the telephone. How on earth would you even do that?”

“I have no idea, but it was a complete disaster and I propose that we never speak of it again.”

Joan giggles for a few more minutes as Sherlock’s pout deepens and eventually becomes a full-on scowl.

“Harry Potter, huh?” she says quietly.

“Yeah,” Sherlock replies.

“Wonder what he’s like,” Joan muses.

“Eleven, so probably a little shite,” Sherlock reasons.

“You are a ray of sunshine,” Joan points out. “And I’m going to tell Marcus how you tanked your Muggle Studies OWL.”

“I hate you.”

“Uh-huh.”

-

The Hogwarts Express is unusually crowded this year, but Joan finds Marcus quickly and manages to secure a compartment for them and Sherlock when he finally arrives. His prefect’s badge is pinned to his jumper already (because he likes to rub it in to his father that he’s actually respected at school) and his trunk looks as though it’s got something moving inside of it.

“What do you have in there?” Joan demands as he shoves it into the corner.

“Bees,” he says in a hushed voice. “I want to use that abandoned tower in the East Wing to put together an apiary. Hagrid said he’d help me and Professor Kettleburn says I can do it as an independent study to supplement my NEWT. I already wrote him.”

“So… you spent the summer cultivating bees?" Joan asks as Marcus throws his head back and laughs. "Did someone give you a time-turner? How in Merlin’s name did you have time?”

“Sleep is a very overrated thing,” Sherlock announces.

“We’re are sixteen,” Marcus says. He rolls his eyes and Joan nods her head in agreement. “All we’re supposed to be doing is eating and sleeping.”

“And apparently planning to take over the world with magical bees.”

“That too.”

There’s a knock on the door and two small children - probably new first years - push it open.

“Excuse me, has anyone seen a toad?” a girl with a giant mop of bushy curls asks.

“I lost mine…” the little boy with her begins to explain in a meek-sounding voice. “His name’s Trevor and he’s about this big…”

Joan glances around. “I haven’t seen one, have either of you?”

Sherlock and Marcus shake their heads. “I can tell the other prefects to keep an eye out,” Joan says. “If you want help.”

“That’d be brilliant,” the girl says and slams the door closed behind her as they continue down the train.

“Ugh. First years,” Sherlock groans. "I hope our crop is good this year, last year’s left me bored out of my skull.“

"That’s because you’re in Ravenclaw and they’re all too smart,” Joan advises him. “Come spend time with ours, they’re usually pretty great.”

“I miss Martha,” Sherlock groans. “And Bill Weasley. And Tonks.”

“We all do, man,” Marcus says. “Two more years…”

The unpleasant jolt of realization that they are now the older students that the first and second years will idolize is … a jarring one to stomach. Joan swallows nervously and tries not to think about all the responsibility that’s about to crash down on their shoulders.

-

Harry Potter is sorted into Gryffindor and the whole school seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief at the (somewhat predictable) result of his sorting. Some of the fifth years are arguing that maybe he was hard to place because the hat took so long to make a decision. Joan understands that, to some extent, and introduces herself to the new Hufflepuffs with a kind smile and a wink at a nervous-looking girl named Hannah.

“Marcus and I are the sixth year prefects,” she explains. “There are seventh years and fifth years as well, and we’re always here, if you want to talk to us about anything.”

“Your father writes for _Potions Quarterly_ ,” a boy who introduced himself as Zacharias says, leaning across the table eagerly. “My dad gets it.”

“And you’ve been reading it?” Joan asks, eyebrows shooting up her forehead. What her stepfather writes is dense on the best of days, even for her.

“Not really, but he was on the cover last month." Zacharias wrinkles his nose. "You look nothing like him.”

And Joan says nothing, because she’s not having that conversation with an eleven year old.

-

Their new Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor is terrible, and Joan’s not entirely sure why Sherlock’s insisting that they take his class. It’s probably because it’s the one class that they’ll have together outside of Potions and Snape has been in a mood since term started.

Joan spends most of that class filling out prefect reports and only passively paying attention to Professor Quirrel. Someone is running some sort of a troublemaking ring and Joan’s not entirely sure that she can blame this on Fred and George Weasley. They’re not the type to deny their involvement with such things, and this person is sneaky and has gone to great lengths to not get caught.

“Who do you think it is?” Joan whispers to Sherlock as he doodles in the corner of his parchment.

“Some seventh year having a reign of terror before they leave. Money on a Slytherin or Ravenclaw. They’re the only bastards sneaky enough to get past you and I.”

“Not to mention Marcus,” Joan says.

“Too right.”

After their class is over, Joan takes a winding route back to Hufflepuff in order to drop an assignment off with Professor Vector. On the third floor, cutting behind a tapestry, she hears a gaggle of voices, and then the sound of something being slammed against the wall. She takes a deep breath to steady herself and pushes the tapestry aside.

Three fifth year boys, two from Slytherin, one from Ravenclaw, are looming over a girl who is very obviously a first year. Joan doesn’t recognize her, but her eyes go wide when she sees Joan.

One of the Slytherin boys spins around, and Joan recognizes him: Marcus Flint, he’s on the Slytherin quidditch team and Sherlock hates him. “This isn’t any of your concern.”

“Fifth years intimidating first years is always my concern, Flint,” Joan replies coolly. She hates dealing with the trouble makers that are her own age or close to it. There’s such a disconnect there, and she feels like she doesn’t actually have any real authority. “What are you doing here?”

Flint folds his arm over his chest and scowls. His cheeks are flushed, like he’s embarrassed and Joan’s eyes narrow. What on earth could he be embarrassed about? “Nothing,” he says forcefully, pushing past Joan and heading towards the passageway she’s just come out of. “It was nothing.”

Joan stares after him for a long time, her brow furrowed in confusion. She has no idea what on earth could have been the matter with him, but she doesn’t particularly feel like chasing after him for an explanation. She turns to the tiny thing that that was sorted right before Harry Potter. She’s in Slytherin. “Are you alright?” she asks.

There’s something in the girl’s eyes, a flicker of a lie before the truth smoothes over the intent to innocence. “I’m fine,” she says. She smiles at Joan. “Thanks to you.”

“You shouldn’t let the older students in your house do things like that to you. Go to Professor Snape, if you must,” Joan says, bending down so that they’re nose to nose. “He’s scary, I know, but he’s a fair head of house. He’ll get it sorted.”

“Why would I ask Snape for help when I could just ask you?” she asks, eyes wide and not at all innocent. “This wasn’t what it looked like.”

“I’m sure,” Joan says shortly.

“Flint’s father…” she shrugs. “Family history is a closely guarded secret at this school, is it not?”

Joan bites her lip, thinking of her own secrets and the letters her mother still sets on fire that come monthly, status updates on her father, locked away in Azkaban for what he’d done. “I suppose you’re right." She gets back to her feet. "You should head back to you common room. Do you know the way?”

“I do.”

-

“I think you have a stalker, Watson.”

Joan whips around to peer over Sherlock’s shoulder at that tiny blonde first year sitting by herself at the end of the Slytherin table, a quill in hand. “Oh,” is all she can think to say.

“Do you know who that is?” Sherlock asks, his eyebrows drawing together and his expression suddenly serious.

“No?”

“That’s the Moriarty heir.”

“What? Really?" The Moriartys were an old Irish wizarding family that had fallen out of favor in recent years because of their alliance with the dark arts and their practitioners, but they hadn’t been seen in proper wizarding since Grindlewald’s day. Joan remembers reading rumors about them in _The Quibbler_ with Oren as a kid - saying that their heir was a squib and so the line had ended. "I thought they’d died out.”

“Evidently not,” Sherlock says. “Had Harry Potter not been sorted right after her, I’m sure it would have been a much greater to do. Even amongst You-Know-Who’s supporters, the Moriarty name is practically dirt. Why she didn’t go to Durmstrang or Beauxbatons is completely beyond me." He shakes his head. "Who was bothering her?”

“Marcus Flint.”

“I’ll hit him with a bludger.”

“I’m not really sure–”

“Oh, Watson, don’t worry so much. The sins of the father are not the sins of the child. Aren’t we living proof of that?”

“I suppose so…”

-

“Your father writes for _Potions Quarterly_.”

The voice comes from Joan’s elbow and she’s buried in _Advanced Potions Making_ and she jumps about three feet in the air, turning to stare at bright blue eyes sometimes in mid-November. There’d been a troll attack in the school at Halloween – it had caught some poor Gryffindor first year in a toilet - and Joan’s been doing more patrols than ever.

“Merlin, you scared me,” Joan mutters.

“But he’s not your real father.”

Joan scowls.

“Are you following me?”

“I was trying to think of a way to pay you back, for helping me. Slytherins always pay their debts.” She’s so insistent, her fingers curling around the fabric of Joan’s jumper that Joan wants to pull back.

“I don’t even know your name,” is all that Joan can think to say.

“It’s Jamie.” The girl holds out a hand. “Jamie Moriarty.”

“Joan Watson.”

“That’s not your last name,” Jamie Moriarty says, shaking her head. “Not really.”

“You are eleven–”

“Twelve now.”

“Twelve, whatever. You are way too young to be saying things like that, things that you cannot possibly understand, alright? It’s none of your business who my father is.”

Joan finds herself being hushed by Madam Pince and staring down a not-eleven-year-old with wide blue eyes and lips twisted into a smirk. She leans in, voice barely above a whisper. “Don’t you see, Joan Watson, that that’s as good as an admission?" And then she’s gone, blonde curls bouncing behind her as she flounces out of the library.

Someone snickers behind the stacks and Joan turns to see one of the seventh year Ravenclaw prefects giggling behind his hand. Joan buries her head in her hands and groans.

-

Going home over the Christmas Hols is nice, Joan gets to see Oren and her mother and stepfather. It’s a quiet sort of a holiday with them, because her mother’d never really celebrated before getting married to her father. Joan spends a lot of time watching football on telly with Oren. He still follows Quidditch religiously, but it’s easier for him to talk to his mates about football.

"Do you ever wonder what it’d be like if we were different?” Oren asks. “If I wasn’t a squib?”

The pain of that hurt is gone. Only the shame remains, but it is a shame that Joan knows she has no reason to feel. There are other, deeper shames in this family, after all.

“I do,” she says, because she misses him. They’ve grown apart in the time that she’s at Hogwarts and he’s at some secondary school that his mother and stepfather have found through the Squib Outreach Group that’s funded by the Ministry. He’ll be going to college soon, and then maybe on to university. Joan has to take her NEWTs and hopefully be able to get into healer training. “But knowing what I know of your potential classmates, I’m glad you’re not there. They’re a bunch of trouble makers and self-important arses.”

“I was talking to Marcus’ brother,” Oren says. “Since he’s a muggle and not a squib, telling him about things. We would have been in the same class.”

“And probably both in Hufflepuff, you could have been the best of friends instead of pen-pals." Joan sighs and leans against him. They’re sixteen and fourteen and the world is pressing down around them. At least the war is over. "Did I tell you Harry Potter’s a first year this year?”

“Really? What’s he like?”

Joan shrugs. “Dunno. I don’t have many friends in Gryffindor now that Bill Weasley and his brother Charlie are gone. They let him on the Quidditch team, he’s a natural. Never flown before, if Sherlock’s to be believed.”

“Wow.”

“If I’m honest, I don’t think he knows how famous he is.”

“Damn.”

“Language, Oren,” their mother calls from the kitchen and Joan flashes him a sympathetic look.

-

Sherlock thinks the whole twelve-year-old stalker thing is really rather hilarious. He would. The arse.

They’re sitting in Professor Snape’s office, or rather; Joan is huddled in the corner very pointedly not looking at anything in the shelves that line the walls while Sherlock is in the middle of a very spirited discussion of with Snape about his term project - something about the medicinal merits of the honey of the magical species of bees that he’s now got set up in an abandoned classroom on the seventh floor since the East Wing is apparently off limits. Joan’s own project is on various shortcuts and cutting techniques that improve basic potion bases and is considerably more boring than Sherlock exclaiming 'magical bees!’ at every possible opportunity.

“While I am sure, Mr. Holmes, that your ideas have merit, you must narrow the scope of your project. This is only a term project in a NEWT-level class, and certainly not the only one you are taking. I will not have Professor McGonagall or Flitwick breaking down my door and demanding to know why your grades are slipping." He looks over at Joan. "That goes for you as well, Ms. Watson.”

“My project is–” Joan starts.

“Deceptively simple, yes. I have read your proposal. You and Mr. Holmes both need to remember that you are only two people. You cannot change the world at sixteen by yourselves.”

It is oddly nice for Snape, and Joan flashes him a small smile. He glares at her with black eyes that make her want to back away slowly.

The advice is a dismissal and Sherlock shoves his notes back into his bag and heads towards the door.

“Ms. Watson,” Snape adds, long nose already buried in his grading. “You would do well to figure out a way to placate the Moriarty girl before she does something drastic.”

Joan blinks. “Sorry, sir?”

“The Moriarty girl. She feels she owes you a debt and desperately wants to repay it." Snape looks up then, and his expression is odd. "She handled the problem of Master Flint admirably.”

“She did?”

“While I cannot prove it was her, she is not nearly as subtle as she thinks she is,” Snape narrows his eyes. “Find something and have her do it, and soon, Watson. I’ll not have her creating circumstances thought which to play the hero.”

-

“Stop following me.”

“I’m not.”

“First Years have either Herbology or Charms right now, you are in neither. Why is that?”

“I wanted to see you Joan.”

“I will take points from Slytherin, Jamie, don’t think I won’t.”

She’s met with a wounded look and a small body squirming onto the bench next to her. They’re in the central courtyard, overlooking the heated passageways under one of Joan’s strongest warming charms. Joan sighs and raises her arm so that her cloak (because she has her’s with her) falls over Jamie’s shoulders. “You know that you shouldn’t skip class, right?”

Jamie nods. “I was actually coming back from Madame Pomfrey. I took a hex in Defense and Professor Quirrel was insistent that I be checked over. I hate Terry Boot.”

“You’re both first years, your aim isn’t going to be great, Jamie. You shouldn’t say you hate anyone.”

“There are so many people who should be hated. The Dark Lord, his followers… the list goes on and on. Are we not wrong to hate those who have wrong us? Are we not wrong to seek revenge?" Jamie glances up at Joan, her eyes a question.

"I would keep your opinions about You-Know-Who to yourself in Slytherin House.”

“I learned that lesson already,” she gives a little giggle. “Too bad Flint had to learn his own after making his opinion known." Her lip curls then, and she doesn’t look twelve any more. Joan wonders if this is what Professor Snape was talking about, this twisted expression that comes over this little girl that makes her seem dangerous.

"They can’t prove it was you, you know." Joan says, ignoring the way that Jamie has inched closer, now leaning against her. "I heard the teachers talking about how they think it was the Weasley twins, but Professor Snape knows better. You should be more careful.”

“I will.”

Joan looks up at the sky and casts a silent tempus charm. The lesson’s more than half over at this point. “I’ll make your excuses to Professor Flitwick, what are you learning in class right now?”

“Page turning at a distance.”

Joan cannot remember being that young or having that poor control over her magic. “Do you want to learn something useful?" At Jamie’s enthusiastic nod, Joan spends the better part of twenty minutes instructing her on how to cast a warming charm before they walk back to Professor Flitwick’s classroom on the third floor. Jamie’s cheeks are flushed and her shoes are wet, but Joan explains that she was in the hospital wing for half the period and Flitwick merely nods and gives her the homework assignment before dismissing both of them.

-

"I think that first year has a crush on you,” Marcus says, his mouth full. They’re getting ready for the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff quidditch match and Joan’s not entirely sure why she’s going, because it’s freezing outside and the sky above them is threatening snow in the worst way. “She won’t stop staring at you.”

Joan doesn’t look, but rather busies herself with her toast. “Don’t remind me,” she says. She’s trying not to think too hard about how Jamie Moriarty has become her shadow, and how it’s super weird and the kid is twelve and she’s so obviously crushing on Joan that it’s just… ugh.

Sherlock thinks the whole thing is hilarious. Sherlock is an arse.

“Don’t let Sherlock hit you with a bludger, okay?” Joan says between bites of toast.

“I fully intend to win,” Marcus says. “Their seeker is a second year - Cho Chang…” he shakes his head. “They’re madmen, thinking that that tiny girl is going to survive long in this weather. I hope Diggory can catch the snitch before too long." He glances over at the Ravenclaw team; they’re all sitting together at the end of the end of one of the long tables, speaking in low, hushed voices. "I don’t want to take responsibility for Holmes losing any of his bits because it’s too cold.”

“As if Sherlock won’t be cheating with the strongest warming spells he knows.”

“Maybe we can hit him with a bludger or two, knock some sense into him.”

“Good luck.”

Joan is halfway out of the Great Hall some twenty minutes later when she finds herself being followed once more.

“Jamie,” she says, her voice barring no argument. “Stop.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Sure.”

“I was just going to the match,” she adds, shrugging. She’s wearing her cloak this time, and a winter cap and what looks like two jumpers. “We’re going the same way, Joan.”

Joan sighs, “Come along then.”

-

It is the middle of March when Jamie announces how she’s going to repay Joan. “I’m going to marry you one day,” she adds, leaning in far too close and upsetting the chess pieces on the board between Sherlock and Joan. Not many people are in the Great Hall right now. There’s a knot of Gryffindor first years discussing something in hushed voices and a few Ravenclaws at the other end of the table studying.

“That’s awfully presumptuous,” Sherlock says. “Who is to say that Watson even likes women?”

Jamie smiles prettily at him. “No one who was attracted to men would spend any amount of time with you.”

Even Joan thinks that that’s harsh and flashes Sherlock a sympathetic smile.

“You wound me, Slytherin child.”

“I am simply making an observation.”

Joan thinks that they’re both idiots.

“You’ve check in three moves,” Jamie adds, whispering in Joan’s ear. She is twelve and Joan is impossibly uncomfortable with this.

-

“Don’t you ever hang out with the kids in your own year?” Joan asks in mid-April when she finds Jamie by herself in the courtyard, practicing Transfiguration. “I mean, I know that the Malfoy boy is a bit of a prat, but Daphne Greengrass and Milly Bulstrone seem nice.”

“They’re all obsessed with blood purity and the Dark Lord,” Jamie mutters, mostly to herself. “I have no interest in that.”

“Because your family’s in disgrace?”

“No more than yours or Sherlock’s. Your mother tried to shield you from the shame, but Sherlock’s did not. A family of Slytherins and he’s the only Ravenclaw in generations? No, he doesn’t hide the way you do. Watson isn’t a wizarding name, but if you were to tell people who your father really was, people would look at you differently." Jamie looks up and her eyes are red like she’s been crying. "My family did not care for this most recent Dark Lord, and we fell into disgrace because of it. No matter, I’ve no time for such a petty man.”

“You’re twelve.”

“Joan; you’re sixteen, nearly seventeen, nearly an adult. The world isn’t just good people and death eaters." She gets up then, takes her box of muggle matches, and disappears inside once more, leaving Joan staring after her and wondering how in Merlin’s name this child had become so wise.

-

Something happens, shifts really, at the end of term. Dumbledore looks drawn and just a little worried as he gets up and announces that Slytherin actually hasn’t won the House Cup. Joan doesn’t particularly care, because Hufflepuff lost a lot of points after some of the fourth years thought it’d be cute to sneak out to Hogsmeade just two weeks ago and they haven’t recovered.

Joan sits next to Marcus and listens to Dumbledore speak of bravery and excellent games of chess and cool logic. He’s talking about Harry Potter and his friends and Sherlock’s leaning over demanding to know what they’ve done. Joan’s got no idea and Marcus is equally clueless. The Slytherins all look dumbfounded, and Joan doesn’t really blame them, they’d had it won, fair and square.

Professor Quirrel is nowhere to be found. Dumbledore himself had proctored their Defense finals and he’d looked even more worried than than he does now.

"Think it had anything to do with Quirrel?" Sherlock asks.

"Sherlock, I have no idea.”

“I want to know,” he whines, and his leg is around bouncing. He’ll have it all worked out by the time they’re back in London, Joan’s sure of that at least. “What did Potter and Bill’s brother do anyway?”

“Merlin knows.”

*

year seven

Two things happen over the summer that Joan isn’t entirely prepared for. The first is that she somehow ends up writing to Jamie Moriarty; the second is that Sherlock co-opts her into helping him out with his consultation work with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

“Well, you’re of age now, it’ll give you time to practice apparation without splinching yourself,” her mother says when Joan tells her of Sherlock’s plans for her free time. “Although I wish you’d stop spending time with that Holmes boy.”

“He’s my best friend, ma.” Joan insists. “And he’s nothing like his father." It’s an old argument, and one that her mother knows better than to make. Joan will defend Sherlock. Joan has to defend Sherlock because so few people do.

Joan meets Kingsley Shacklebolt and Tommy Gregson at the Leaky Cauldron after only her third licensed apparation. They’re sitting with Sherlock, who’s dusty and looks like he’d floo'ed in. He doesn’t like the risks associated splinching, apparently, even though he has a license.

She writes to Jamie about it later, because the girl is all alone in a ‘big manor house in the middle of the Irish countryside’ that is 'dreadfully dull’ and the idea of magical law enforcement is actually interesting enough to Joan that she wants to tell someone about it. Someone, she thinks, who could probably use some steering in the right direction. Joan isn’t entirely sure where she gets the sense that Jamie Moriarty has an agenda all her own, even at twelve, but it’s worrying.

So she writes about the case that Gregson is working on, about how she saw her friend Tonks for the first time in a few years who’s now apprenticed to a senior investigator. She tells Jamie about the kidnapping of some part veela children from France and how they think that there’s a link to some dark forces from Romania. It’s all very twisted and convoluted when she writes it all down and reads it back to herself, but it’s interesting and certainly better than the summer reading list of Every Single One of Gilderoy Lockheart’s books. Joan got three pages into _Wandering with Werewolves_ and wondered if there was a summary somewhere that she could read instead. The insipid writing is enough to make her want to scream, cry, or possibly tear her hear out. She’s already resigned herself to buying last year’s Defense text to make sure she’s prepared for the NEWT.

What is more interesting, in retrospect, is that Jamie writes back and then floo calls and scares Oren half to death.

"Joan there’s a five-year-old in the fire for you,” he says, coming into the kitchen as she’s putting the kettle on.

From the hallway a faint, “I am not five!” can be heard.

Joan lets out a groan and turns back to the kettle. “Watch this?” she asks him.

“Sure.”

Jamie Moriarty’s head is floating in the fire. She looks even paler than she did during the school year, and her lips are pursed impatiently as she regards Joan. “You are looking at the wrong groups for the veela case,” she begins without preamble, launching into a detailed explanation of why Joan and Sherlock’s theory of the case, as given to them by Auror Gregson, is completely wrong. “You’re investigating the wrong factions, this has nothing to do with the Romanians, Joan, you need to focus on domestic perpetrators.”

“You’re twelve." Joan says, shaking her head. "What could you possibly know?”

“Enough,” Jamie Moriarty says grimly. The look that drifts across her face speaks volumes.

-

They spend the entire summer on the case. Even Oren and Andre get involved, though only after Joan appeals to Marcus’ none-too-secret desires to go into Auror training once his NEWTs are done. Eventually they catch the kidnappers – there’s a whole ring of them and it’s a messy business, far messier than Joan could have ever imagined. She’s of age, are Sherlock and Marcus, but they’re watching the backs of an under-aged witch, a squib and a muggle.

Shacklebolt and Gregson are not, exactly, thrilled by the investigatory team, but they’re grateful for any insights as apparently the press had gotten wind of it and a terrible woman named Rita Skeeter was sniffing around the Auror offices with far too many questions. They simply wanted it one. This has been a trying case that they’ve had trouble keeping out of the papers. This isn’t the sort of press that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement wants, and when Sherlock figures out where the letters that are being sent to the DMLE are coming from with a complicated tracer charm that’s well about NEWT-level, they’re able to decipher the clues and give Gregson and Shacklebolt a suspect and subsequently the missing children.

“I think I want to be a policeman when I get older,” Andre says, eyeing the witness statements that Marcus is working on at Joan’s kitchen table at the end of the night. “Except the paperwork sounds horrible.”

“It is,” Gregson comments from where he’s sipping tea out of a cup that Joan’s mother provided him with. They’re all loitering in Joan’s kitchen, she’s not entirely sure why. “And I’m not sure 'bout muggles, but it’s a thankless job for wizards.”

It is later, when everyone’s left save Sherlock, that Gregson turns to Joan. “It’s good that you’re letting that Moriarty girl help with this.”

“Why?”

Gregson looks uncomfortable for a moment before he relaxes. “There are whispers, bad things out of Romania, out of the north. The prisoners in Azkaban are restless." He rubs at the back of his neck. "I know it’s stupid, but You Know Who, he’s gone – but it feels like the war, all over again.”

-

The pressure of their imminent NEWTS starts to set in once they’re back at school and settled. Joan tries to ignore the stares at the Head Girl badge that’s pinned to her chest. It’s been a long time since a Hufflepuff has been named Head-anything. Cedric Diggory, a new, fifth year prefect, is particularly enamored with the idea and announces that when he’s a seventh year, he will be head boy. Joan tells him to concentrate on his schoolwork first and foremost if he hopes to beat out the other students in his year.

“I’m not sure I like you with this much authority,” Sherlock grumbles from where he’s buried in an old Greek text that Martha Hudson must have sent him off with after he visited her just before term started. “It’ll make your head get big.”

“I think you’re just bitter you got beat out by a Slytherin,” Joan replies, nodding to the tall, dark-haired boy that had been named by Dumbledore as Head Boy. Joan doesn’t think he’s from one of the old families, maybe even muggle born. He certainly doesn’t talk about it. No one does in Slytherin House. “Did you talk to Professor Kettleburn?”

Sherlock nods. “He and Professor Snape are going to let me continue the apiary provided I give them both access. I’m thinking about breeding a new species.”

“What does Snape want with it?”

“The honey, mostly. He’s doing some work on the wolfsbane potion and apparently the honey is a key ingredient.”

“Get a promise for credit in writing.”

“Yes, mum.”

“Did you notice that Harry Potter and that Weasley boy didn’t turn up at the feast last night?" Sherlock scowls. "Maybe they’ve already gotten into trouble.”

“That would explain why Gryffindor is already in the negative points." Marcus says, interjecting into the conversation. "I heard from Angelina Johnson that they missed the train.”

“How…" Joan decides she doesn’t want to know. The fact that two _second year_ boys missed the bloody train is mind boggling.

-

Gilderoy Lockheart is a joke. Joan’s had bad defense professors before, but he might actually take the cake. She is actually contemplating asking Professor McGonagall if there is any way that Professor Dumbledore or, hell, even Snape (everyone knows he wants the job, and Joan doesn’t care about any old affiliations so long as she gets a decent mark on her NEWT) could teach a secondary class just so that the seventh years don’t go into the exam woefully unprepared.

She’s sitting between Sherlock and Marcus, eyeing their blonde, foppish professor as he talks about his experiences. "He’s lying,” she says in an undertone to Sherlock.

“I know,” Sherlock says, “but he’s very good at it.”

Joan wonders why he’s lying, what he’s got to hide. He seems so shiny, so clean and sparkly. It’s all a lie, and Joan wants to know why.

-

“Professor Lockheart is in love with Harry Potter,” Jamie grumbles to Joan one day in October. “It’s disgusting and I want to get him sacked.”

Joan swallows, remembering her conversation with Professor Snape the previous year. She’d let Jamie’s declaration of twelve year old adoration slide because it was easier than the alternative of finding a way to gently turn her down. She’d seen the boils on Flint’s arms and back during the next Hufflepuff-Slytherin quidditch match. She didn’t know if she trusts this girl to not actually follow through with such a threat.

“At least he doesn’t stutter,” she says, because Professor Quirrel’s stutter had been horrid and nearly impossible to understand at times.

“At least we were learning something then. Professor Lockheart let cornish pixies loose in class and couldn’t even manage the charm to freeze them. Hermione Granger had to do it and she was too busy trying to protect the rest of the class to show anyone else how to do the charm." Jamie slumps down onto the bench next to Joan, earning an odd look from Hannah Abbot, who is sitting nearby.

Joan closes _Advanced Transfiguration Theory_ and turns to regard Jamie. There’s a cut on her cheek and her hair is tangled. She looks like she’s been crawling around on a dusty classroom floor. Joan doesn’t think she’s ever seen her look so dirty. "Do you really think he’s that bad, because I could–”

She doesn’t get to finish because Jamie is looking up at her with such adoration that Joan’s brain is back-peddling so fast that she thinks she might trip over herself. “Would you?” Jamie asks, eyes wide and blue and she’s way too close. Joan wants to pull away, to back up and to tell Jamie to keep her distance. She is far, far too young for this sort of thing, or Joan’s too old. Either way, it’s bloody uncomfortable. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Joan says. “I’ll write my mum for my second year notes and you can have them.”

-

The year drags on. Sherlock’s apiary is turning into quite the endeavor, and Joan spends a great deal of her free time (such that it is) helping him with the upkeep of it. Hagrid helps as well, but he’s too busy dealing with the fact that someone keeps killing all the school roosters and ransacking his gardens as of late.

Everyone’s worried about the attack that happened on Halloween, and Joan and Sherlock have both been stuck pulling extra patrol duties, and already it’s not working. Another boy - a first year Gryffindor - was attacked and petrified.

“Do you think it’s some sort of spell?” Sherlock asks as Joan flips over her transfiguration essay to draw a spell diagram on as an appendix.

“Hum?”

“That’s petrifying people?”

Joan shrugs. “Professor Sprout’s trying to accelerate the mandrakes she’s growing, which means it’s probably a magical creature or potion, rather than a spell. Spells all have counterspells." She twists her wrist and writes the appropriate runes in the corners of her diagrams. "I don’t want you going after whatever it is.”

“But it’s so interesting, Joan, have you ever tried to research the Chamber of Secrets?" Sherlock’s practically vibrating just thinking about it. He does so love playing investigator. Joan hopes he’ll actually go back to working with the aurors after they’re done with school. "I would love to find it.”

“You’re not going to.”

“Spoilsport.”

“I’m a realist. The last thing I need is you petrified or worse right before your NEWTs,” Joan sighs. “Dumbledore is looking into it, anyway. We needn’t bother with it.”

“Some of the Ravenclaw first years think the culprit is Harry Potter.”

Joan rolls her eyes. “The Potters are an old Gryffindor family, old as time practically. I doubt that they’re related to Salazar Slytherin.”

“Not swarthy enough?” Sherlock asks.

“Merlin, Sherlock. He’s twelve years old, he isn’t the heir of bloody Slytherin.”

-

“Are you doing to the Dueling Club that Professor Snape is sponsoring?”

Jamie sounds breathless and excited, and Joan realizes that it’s been close to three weeks since they’ve had a meaningful conversation. She’s been wrapped up in the controversy over the Heir of Slytherin just as much as Sherlock has; only she’s at the middle of it in the Slytherin common room. Joan’s counterpart hasn’t had much to say about it on their shared patrols and in prefect coordination - however he has insisted that Slytherins be placed on patrols with other houses to avoid any misconceptions from the student body.

“I…" Joan honestly hasn’t thought about it. She and Sherlock were planning on revisiting their OWL-level Potions texts and notes over the hols to brush up before Snape’s final project is due in March. "I suppose I could go.”

“Brilliant,” Jamie says and scoots closer to Joan. It’s cold in the courtyard, Joan supposes, but it’s still awkward. “Will you teach me something so that I can beat whomever I’m paired with?”

“I’m not entirely sure that’s a good idea.”

She’s so young but Joan knows better than to trust those wide, innocent eyes. There have been some complaints to the new Slytherin prefects about her, about how she knows things that she shouldn’t know and makes good use of the information. About how she’s blackmailing half the school and how no one can prove a thing.

“Oh come on,” Jamie leans against Joan’s shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be anything spectacular.”

Joan teaches her the bat bogey hex and says that she will do something terrible to Jamie if she hears about bats coming out of Professor Snape’s nose.

Jamie kisses her cheek and bounces out of the courtyard.

She’s thirteen bloody years old and this has _got_ to stop.

-

There is another attack right before Christmas, it’s one of their own and Joan feels sick to her stomach just thinking about her failure to protect that little boy. She’s all ready to actually step up her patrols, to do anything to stop this from happening again, but then there’s nothing.

Eventually even Sherlock loses interest and turns his focus back to his bees, Joan to her transfiguration finals and all the revising she has to do for herbology. She’s never been so grateful to have dropped ancient runes in her life. Arithmancy is enough to keep her runic knowledge up.

It’s odd, to feel like an adult at a school full of children. In March Joan applies for healer school and is accepted, pending her NEWTs. Sherlock has decided he’s going to take his father’s blood money and use it to fund a consulting business with the aurors. They’re young, but they’re starting to feel like adults.

It’s April when Marcus gets into the auror training program, pending his NEWTs, and he reads the letter out loud to the whole of the Hufflepuff (and adjoining Slytherin) tables. People clap, he takes a bow. Draco Malfoy makes a rude gesture. Joan takes five points from Slytherin.

It feels… Good.

-

In May there is another attack. This time it’s an older student - a sixth year Ravenclaw that has Sherlock really upset (they were apparently good friends), and Hermione Granger, one of the second-year Gryffindors that’s become friends with Harry Potter. Joan doesn’t let Jamie out of her sight for two days, not questioning when she turns up in the Hufflepuff common room with a bruise on her cheek and red eyes. She’s hurt and angry and Joan wonders if the Slytherins blame her for what’s happening somehow.

“The mandrakes are almost mature,” Joan says as she does a transfiguration practice theory exam. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, Joan, I just don’t like the fact that my peers are convinced I’m involved with this,” Jamie scowls and scribbles something out on her essay.

“Stop blackmailing them then,” Joan suggests. It’s the first time she’s ever acknowledged her knowledge of Jamie’s other hobby openly, and the speed at which Jamie looks up is almost comical.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says flatly.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Joan replies dryly. “You should make friends your own age anyway, Jamie. I’m going to be gone next year. As are Sherlock and Marcus. Who’s going to protect you when they get mean then?”

Jamie bites her lip and says nothing.

-

“There is a great bloody basilisk beneath this school and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy,” Sherlock announces over breakfast a few days before the NEWT exam proctors are set to arrive.

“A basilisk?" Marcus says dubiously. "That seems a bit much.

Sherlock shoots him a baleful look. "Hagrid’s roosters were strangled, it all makes sense!”

“Sherlock, none of it makes sense." Joan closes her charms text book and glares at him. "A giant, murderous snake running around Hogwarts. Surely someone would have–”

_Merely looking into its eyes can kill…_

“Bloody hell,” she mutters.

Sherlock, the prat, looks impossibly smug.

-

Joan doesn’t let Jamie out of her sight. Sherlock’s written to his father asking about when he was in school, as apparently there were a series of similar attacks when he was at school, but he agrees that no one should go anywhere alone. This late into term Joan’s professors have all but given up teaching them new material anyway. They’re in review, so Joan can duck out of classes to walk Jamie around the school.

“I don’t need a body guard, you know,” Jamie says dejectedly. “I was doing just fine on my own." But her hand curls around Joan’s and she never lets go until Joan’s left her at the door to her next class or the blank expanse of wall that hides the Slytherin common room. She isn’t afraid, she’ll insist, but she is worried. Everyone is worried.

When Ginny Weasley, Bill’s youngest sibling and the only Weasley girl in generations, goes missing the school is in an uproar. Joan doesn’t want to die looking into the eyes of a basilisk and tells Professor Snape as much when he sets her with the task of watching Percy Weasley 'to keep him from doing anything rash.’

"How do you know it’s a basilisk?” Snape asks in a low voice as Percy lets out a quiet moan that could have been a sob. The school governors are here, they’ve already sacked Hagrid, and they’re after Dumbledore now. Ginny Weasley is probably dead. “Did Holmes come up with this ridiculous conjecture?”

Joan bites her lip and shrugs. “What else could it be, sir?”

Snape’s lips press into a thin line. He sees her logic, Sherlock’s logic, he cannot argue with it. “The day that Sherlock Holmes leaves this school cannot come soon enough,” he grumbles and sends Joan, Percy Weasley in two, up to the hospital wing to await the arrival of Molly and Arthur Weasley. It is a task she does not want, for it means being with the family of a girl who may very well have died and Joan doesn’t think she can stomach that.

-

Somehow, Harry Potter saves the day.

“Draco Malfoy says that there was a basilisk and that Harry Potter killed it,” Jamie announces at breakfast the day before exams are due to start. Joan is buried in fourth-year arithmancy notes, going over basic formulas. “And that they’re canceling exams.”

“Not for NEWT students,” Joan says around a mouth full of toast. “And does this mean that you’re talking to your housemates now?”

Jamie gives her a look and steals the other piece of toast from Joan’s plate. “Well, I think he’s come down to earth some, after Harry Potter stole his house elf and embarrassed his father in front of the board of governors?”

“How do you even know about that?” Joan mutters, her eyes still on her notes.

“It is my business to know such things,” Jamie says simply. Joan thinks that come Jamie’s graduation from this place they’re going to have a lot more to deal with than simply knowing things she shouldn’t. Keeping her away from the evils of this world, as she, at thirteen is already so keen to embrace them.

_Sig kap sub two delta._.. Joan’s eyes narrow as she reads the formula. She can’t be this little girl’s better angel, she needs one herself.

-

It is odd, leaving Hogwarts and knowing that she probably won’t be coming back. Joan stares up at the castle and bites at her lip, feeling the weight of that departure weighing heavily on her. Sherlock and Marcus are there. They’re going to move into a row house in London together while they’re doing their training for their chosen careers.

“I’m going to miss this place,” Sherlock says. His pocket is buzzing ominously, he’s shrunk his bees down to a fraction of their size and they’re not taking well to it at all. “So many fond memories.”

Marcus laughs. “The Inter-House football league was great.”

“You told me I was bad at flying!” Joan protests. “I had to do something.”

“And I am forever sorry I said anything at all.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

-

Epilogue -

Joan doesn’t see or hear from Jamie Moriarty again until Sherlock turns up with her the summer before what would have been Jamie’s seventh year at Hogwarts. Joan’s breath catches in her throat, staring at the woman that girl had become. She’s hardened, her eyes are cold, and she’s got information for them that she explains in clear, concise terms.

Remus Lupin’s arms are folded over his chest, and Bill Weasley is nodding his agreement. “How do we know this information is good?” he asks.

And Joan surprises herself by stepping forward. “It’s good,” she says because she cannot argue with the way that Jamie Moriarty always knows things, things that she should not know, that she cannot possibly know. Joan doesn’t want them to question it either. Because to question means to waste time, and Joan doesn’t think they have much of that left at all.

“How could you know?” the very pregnant Tonks hisses.

“I just do.”

There is nowhere that is safe anymore, it is not advisable to stay so long in a place, but Joan lingers longer than is advisable, catching Jamie Moriarty’s shoulder and finding herself with a wand shoved into the soft skin of her throat, her back slammed against the wall of the meeting space. Never Grimmauld Place any more. Snape took care of that.

“You grew up,” she says as the wand relaxes to rest against her collar bone. Jamie’s breath is hot on the skin her fistful of Joan’s outer robe has grabbed hold of. She looks too young still, and yet her eyes are hard, her lips a thin line.

Until she smiles up at Joan and her entire face twists and changes. “I’m going to keep my promise, Joan,” Jamie says. “If you’d let me.”

There’s a war on, and Joan’s got a hospital wing full of spell damaged victims to attempt to correct, but she nods just once. Jamie kisses her like she’s salvation and somehow, even with death floating over their every move, it feels like enough. 


End file.
